There seems to be no clear answer to this question at all, after spending far more time than is reasonable trawling the internet for a solid answer and finding none I am asking the SPCR forum members for help.
A friend of mine has a PC (that I built - so its quiet) that is running Windows XP, he wants to increase his storage to a 3TB HDD because he needs the extra space and 3TB HDD's work out better value than smaller capacity models.
There are a number of potential problems, the chipset, the BIOS, the drivers, and the OS.
He has a Gigabyte GA-M68SM-S2 motherboard, I have checked the BIOS updates and I have read the manual - there is no mention of support for drives above 2TB
regardless of OS.
http://uk.gigabyte.com/products/product ... id=2640#ovObviously newer OS's (W7) support drives above 2TB, so the OS is not really an issue as the PC could be re-installed with W7 - likewise if the XP drivers dont support drives over 2TB installing W7 will fix the problem.
That then leaves me with the double-problem of the Chipset and BIOS, if the chipset does support drives over 2TB has the BIOS been updated to add that support - the only answer to that is to find someone who has the same or similar setup to confirm, otherwise I will have to suggest that he gets a 2TB drive instead as that is his limit.
Andy