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Max HDD capacity per SATA HDD possible for Z690-E

x10nd
Level 7

The z690-E has 6 SATA ports and I would like to know the max capacity ( like 20TB) HDD 3.5 per SATA port.

 

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Murph_9000
Level 14

SATA is unlimited for all practical purposes.  It currently uses 48 bit block addressing, which means up to 128PB per device with 512 byte blocks, but the storage vendors probably won't be using 512 byte blocks by the time they are selling petabyte drives, as they are already moving up to 4096 byte blocks.

MBR is limited to 2TB, due to 32 bit addresses, but we solved that years ago with GPT.  GPT uses 64 bit addresses.

so i can install 6, 20TB is what you are saying?

Yeah, there's really no practical limit on drive sizes as far as hardware goes.  6 x 20TB should work fine.  Windows 10 or 11 can handle that with NTFS (although ReFS might be more appropriate, but is not yet available on Home & Pro, only Workstation, Server, and Enterprise editions).  Linux can handle big drives without any issues.

You might, however, want to consider a NAS for that much storage.  E.g. something from ASUSTOR.  Massive filesystems are better kept away from desktops that are frequently getting rebooted, occasionally crashing, and constantly undergoing change.  If there's RAID involved, or a lot of heavy write activity, watch out for the pitfalls of SMR drives.

There are still a few things which can be limiting with large drives, such as MBR partitioning, FAT filesystems, and 32-bit operating systems.  Also, RAID rebuild time is HUGE for them at 250MBytes/s (typical SATA HDD speed); so it's not unusual for big servers to use double parity or triple mirroring with them to mitigate against that.