[mhunt]

hello, I have an old Dell Precision 340, the size limit for it's internal hard drives is 120 GB. I like to know if I can connect a larger external hard drive via USB 2.0 or if the PC hardware will limit it's size to those 120 GB even if for example, the external drive I like to get is 2 TB.

Asking Dell Support is of no help because they only read what their support manuals of the specified PC for any question. There were no 2TB external USB 2.0 back then, so, they can't answer.

Thank you for any help.

This post has been edited by mhunt: 19 December 2012 - 07:48 PM

[LiveBrianD]

Yes, that will work if the OS supports it. (I know XP SP3 works fine with my 2TB drive.)

It's worth noting that you can't boot of a drive larger than 2.2TB if you don't have UEFI though. (your machine definitely doesn't) Since external drives usually aren't booted from, that's not an issue for what you want to do.

[mhunt]

LiveBrianD, on 19 December 2012 - 08:25 PM, said:

Yes, that will work if the OS supports it. (I know XP SP3 works fine with my 2TB drive.)

It's worth noting that you can't boot of a drive larger than 2.2TB if you don't have UEFI though. (your machine definitely doesn't) Since external drives usually aren't booted from, that's not an issue for what you want to do.

Thank you! my main OS is OpenSuse 11.2, it has a Windows Partition but only Windows 2000, which is the OS the machine came with, never felt the need to update since I switched to Linux and open source software.


Ok, so, it should work and I should be able to make use of the full capacity of the Hard Drive (2TB) regardless of the limit the pc has on internal hard driver (120 GB).

My plan is to use the external hard drive (Western Digital Elements 2 - 2 TB USB 2.0 ) for both backup and a library of image references that I use.

One last question due to something I read, do I need to have the HD turned off or even unplugged when not in use ?

[LiveBrianD]

From what I'm reading, 2000 doesn't support drives larger than 2TB. (I need to test this though.)

You don't need to unplug the drive when not in use, but it's not a bad idea. I happen to have a WD elements 2TB myself (don't think it's version 2 though), and if I unplug it from the computer, the computer goes to sleep, or it shuts down, the external hard drive spins down as well.

[mhunt]

LiveBrianD, on 20 December 2012 - 07:07 AM, said:

From what I'm reading, 2000 doesn't support drives larger than 2TB. (I need to test this though.)

You don't need to unplug the drive when not in use, but it's not a bad idea. I happen to have a WD elements 2TB myself (don't think it's version 2 though), and if I unplug it from the computer, the computer goes to sleep, or it shuts down, the external hard drive spins down as well.

I'll get the 2 TB version, no need for more. Thanks for the responses and help