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Getting the most from your hard drive larger than 2TB

Using a hard drive larger than 2.1TB on Windows-based computer systems may require special setup considerations:

Seagate Extended Capacity Manager

The Seagate Extended Capacity Manager (ECM) allows your operating system (OS) to support large capacity disks that have the MBR partition style. You are able to use the disk space beyond 2 TB. This free space will be recognized as a separate disk, and will be usable by your operating system and applications as if it were a regular physical hard disk. (ECM User Guide)

Compatibility Highlights

- If your system uses the Intel RST driver, your 3TB disk drive may appear to be 800GB. See our support article about the Intel RST driver.

- System memory requirement is 1GB and higher for 32-bit systems and 2GB and higher for 64-bit systems.

- Extended Capacity Manager software installs a device driver to achieve full capacity on Legacy BIOS systems.

- Windows systems with legacy BIOS using Extended Capacity Manager will need two partitions on the boot drive to achieve full capacity.

- Windows Vista and newer native support for 3TB non-booting data drives is with GPT partitions, available on all systems.

- Windows Vista and newer native support for booting 3TB is on UEFI BIOS systems and using GPT partitions only.

- The startup process is delayed on a computer that has a large hard disk installed and is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2

     Hotfix: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2505454

- Windows support for hard disks that are larger than 2 TB

     https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2581408