Friday, September 6, 2019

hard drive - Why the storage capacity limitation in laptops


As per the documentation for Dell Inspiron 5000 laptops, inspiron-15-5577, in page 15 it is mentioned that,


[Storage] Capacity [of the laptop is]


Hard drive


• Up to 1 TB (hard drive only)


• Up to 1 TB hard drive + up to 128 GB SSD


• Up to 512 GB (PCIe SSD)


Does this means,


• it is not possible to put a 2TB HDD in the laptop?


• an SSD bigger than 128 GB capacity wont work along with a 1TB HDD?


• an SSD bigger than 512 GB capacity wont work at all in this laptop?


If this is correct, why so? Is there any technical constraints?


Answer



Depending on the age of the laptop it may use the "old" BIOS firmware or have UEFI but in "compatibility support" mode. On these systems Windows only supports booting from MBR partitioned disks.


MBR partitioning only supports 1.7TB, so 2TB and above disks may be wasted.


On a full UEFI system Windows uses GPT partitioning where this limit does not exist.


The other limits are probably "we tested this but YMMV". I don't see why there would be a limit on the size of one disk when combined with another disk, the limits will be per disk.


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