First post, by Rekrul
I still have an older system with XP. I want to make backups of all the files on it. I don't have any newer systems. I want to buy either a pair of 2TB external drives, or a single 3TB drive that I can just plug in and use. I know I can use 1TB drives, but buying three of those would be more expensive than buying even two 2TB drives. While drive prices have come down, they never seem to break the $50 barrier.
I tried a 3TB Seagate drive a few months ago (lot of personal stuff came up in the meantime that forced me to put this on the back burner) and XP wouldn't recognize it at all. I don't mean that I couldn't use it properly, or that I couldn't use all the space on it (the most common problems), I mean that Windows wouldn't let me access the drive at all. The only place it showed up was in Disk Management and it wouldn't let me do anything with it.
After looking on the net, people say that XP has a 2TB limit for drives. Then they said that even Seagate's recent 2TB drives don't work in XP either. Some said you could install special software to see the full capacity, but that assumes that you can at least access the drive, which I could not. Others said that Western Digital had 3TB drives that worked in XP, no special software required.
Unfortunately, looking on places like Amazon, there's no concrete information about what versions of Windows any particular drive will work on, or even what revision it is. The Q&A section is useless because half the answers are talking about other models in the same product line rather than THAT exact model.
So can anyone point me toward a 2TB or 3TB external drive that will work in XP Pro, SP3?