said by Bill:To be more specific (because I'm sure everybody cares
), the limitation is in the "total sectors" field in the MBR. It's only 8 bytes (32 bits), which provides for a maximum value of 4,294,967,296 sectors. And at 512 bytes per sector, that comes out to 2TB. 4K sector size ATA disks do exist, but I have only seen them used in CE devices.
And some raid cards, I just setup 8 1TB drives for a 6.36TB raid5 array, as reported by windows, on a w2k system.
I didn't get that deep into it as the OPs question was whether 2TB was a drive limit or total of all drives limit. Without a doubt, it's the former.
said by Bill:Another problem we'll run into in the future is when drives get larger than 2TB, you won't be able to create any new partitions after the 2TB mark on the drive! The "relative sectors" (offset) is also a 8 byte value, so you can't give it a relative address larger than 2TB. But we should all be using GPT instead of MBR by then
I suspect that'll be quite some time from now. It takes a huge amount of data to fill even 2TB, and I'm sure the average user won't run into that problem for a good number of years yet. And I suspect that point won't be quite as bad as all the LBA issues have been.