I recently bought a 4 tb hdd for storage and im having a problem. When I came to formatting the disk in computer management I don't have the full size HDD. It's only 2TB. Why can't I format the full drive? Thanks in advance.
If you want 1 partition for full size you must convert disk type to GPT. MBR type has 2TB limit maximum. In disk management, select the disk# box on the far left, then right click and choose convert to GPT.
That explains it. How do I convert it? I was asked if I wanted MBR or GPT when i first plugged the drive in.
Or just increase the default sector size, 512 byte sectors only allow up to 2.2TB, 4096 byte sectors allow up to 16TB.
True, using 4K or larger also helps against having as much fragmentation too since files are mostly larger than 512b these days. Best to use less blocks per file. You can do GPT on disks on 32bit Windows too since 2003/Vista for data non boot drive. XP 64bit only had the support since it was based on 2003 code base. For boot drive you need 7 or newer and a motherboard with uefi. For OSX and *nix it's been supported since like 'forever'.