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WORKS2011Flag for United States of America

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Dell Optiplex running Windows 10 4T Drive Limitation

Have a new Dell Optiplex 5060, CPU - i7, WIN10, 16M memory, hard drive - SSDR, 512, S3, 80S3, SAMSUNG, PM871B. It came with an additional hard drive tray and SATA connections. I plugged in a secondary 500G SATA drive to test and it detected and worked fine.

I would like to get a Western Digital 6T drive (WD Black 6TB Performance Hard Drive - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD6003FZBX) and Dell responded that the computer is limited to 4T. I believe they have the operating system detecting a bootable drive mixed up with a secondary drive.

My question, will this computer read the second SATA 6T drive or will it be limited to 4T?
Avatar of Dr. Klahn
Dr. Klahn

The only way to know for sure with 100% accuracy on this particular system is to buy the big drive, attach it, and see what Windows thinks of it.  It should work but "should" means nothing at the "does it work on this one" level.
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ASKER

Thank Dr. Klahn, only issue is I'm ordering a drive and was hoping for a more solid answer prior to ordering. I was hoping to find someone that has physically witnessed the drive working in a situation like this. I may have a 6T drive and if so will test. If I find one I'll update this thread.
The site contents may be old and the largest drive at time of publication was a 4TB. The breaking point WAS 2TB and having to use GPT rather than MBR to get the full capacity.  To be honest once past the 2TB hurdle I've never worried about the drive size. 4TB/6TB/10TB/16TB all the same to the computer.
David, to be clear are you saying you've used 6T drives and higher on a WIN10 computer and it's read the drives fine?

When you mention MBR it makes me think you're referencing the C: boot drive where the OS is installed. I'm specifically speaking of a second hard drive without any MBR and utilizing GPT to use the drive as extra space. Nothing to do with booting or the operating system.
i have a WD 6tb here - no problems on win7 or win10
so the only restriction you could have is that DELL put a restriction on the system
in that case, just ask DELL
We have such boxes at my work and they have no problem with 6TB drives as long as they are in GPT partitioning table.
when you have a blank hard drive the first thing you have to do is initialize the drive you are given the options mbr or gpt
MBR is limited to 2TB 3 primary partitions
GPT doesn't have these restrictions.
Ordered a 6T drive and will follow up after installing. Should be here next week.

Thanks for all the input.
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