One area in which this evolution is most welcome is in the arena of hard drive storage capacity, which has long faced restrictions at the operating system level. For example, most personal computers in service today have restrictions on the amount of storage that they will effectively support to two terabytes of data.
While for some users this might seem like a huge amount of data, uncompressed video streams and libraries of high-resolution photographs easily gobble up disk space and could require far more storage capacity.
This 2TB restriction comes from different factors including limits on partition sizes; the number of clusters available; and the peculiarities of the SCSI interface — with the first two issues revolving around the four-byte size of the address table fields which are too small to hold the larger hexadecimal data files needed to support drives greater than 2TB.
Upon closer examination, there are current solutions in place for running RAID arrays that vastly exceed 2TB on 64-bit Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7-based systems using GUID partition tables rather than standard Master Boot Record (MBR) partition tables, with varying degrees of workarounds needed, dependent upon the actual system.
While some BIOS-related and other hardware concerns spring from older machines, a workable solution is had by using a standard MBR partition to hold the operating system and boot the computer, with a GUID-based RAID array for "the sky is the limit" storage.
This is necessary, because according to Microsoft, only Windows for Itanium-based systems can boot from GPT partitions.
Until the next generation of computing is upon us, this multi-disk approach may be the best answer for disk storage-starved computer users.
