My 1TB external drive is getting full. I have 160mb internal. Does anyone know what the maximum combined hard drive space is for Win XP sp2 32bit? I saw Microsoft doesn't recommend anything over 2.2TB for a single drive. I also am aware that sp1 has a max of 1TB combined that it will recognize. I can't locate information for sp2.
What I'm hoping to do is keep the 1TB attached and add a second external through USB and not planning to run RAID on these drives and also not planning to boot from these drives, only store photos, etc.
Memory is RAM and is hardware limited by your processor/buss width.
Storage is hard/optical/ssd drive and is limited by your operating system.
You should just add another drive (and drive letter), perhaps as an external USB or Firewire drive. You can stack as many drives as your OS allows drive letter assignments.
Your plan will not be affected by XPs single-drive space limitation.
I doubt anyone has 1.5TB of memory connected to their personal computer. Storage perhaps (I have about 4.5TB on-line at any given time), but not memory.
There is not really a limit. You can attach 20 1tb drives if you had enough USB ports...until you ran out of drive letters. XP I think has a 2TB volume limit. So if you had an external with a 3TB volume, you are out of luck.
The 2.2 TB limit may apply to the operating system and/or to the controller in an external drive case. So even if the OS could handle 3 TB drives there may be a limit that prevents your existing external drive case from letting it. It has to do with the size and number of data blocks being used on a drive - some hardware and OSs cannot count big enough to cope.
If you exceed the 2.2 TB limit per drive volume / partition then you do not simply get to use the first 2.2 TB of say a 3TB drive. I tried that and all I got was about 0.8 TB. And I had no idea which 0.8 TB of the 3 was actually being used - i.e. how the data was being spread all over the drive.
If in doubt then stick with tried and true 2 TB drives.
If I was you I'd be adding a USB 3.0 card to my computer so that my external drives were not being bogged down to usb 2.0 speeds. eSATA would work too but MS Office activation can get very upset with external eSATA drives being added or removed. That's a MS fault but they still won't fix it.
Also be aware the first part of a hard drive is quicker to access and transfer data than the last part (by quite a bit - say 30-70%). If you need an extra TB then get a 2TB drive and create a 1TB partition on it. That will be faster to use than a 1TB drive and will cost little more than a 1TB drive - plus you can expand it if and when you ever have to.
As mentioned above there is only the per drive limit. I had about 35 TB once in an XPP build. There are some solutions to larger partitions but those are not what I would recommend before upgrading to a 64, but IS.
