The Challenge

Three terabyte hard drives have finally entered the market. With this whopping capacity on-board you can now store up to 400 hours of high-definition video, over half a million digital photos, even more MP3 songs, whatever. And they are affordable, approx. $0.08 per gigabyte, yet boasting an astounding 3-gigabit per second transfer speed, so your Windows can be agile as never before. Sure, you're already thinking of purchasing one of this type and migrating your software environment to it, aren't you? Wait a bit, things are not that simple as they seem.
 

The bulk of Windows computers today are using an older partitioning scheme called the Master Boot Record (MBR) which does not recognize modern ultra-high capacity hard drives. The maximum space it can correctly work with is 2.2TB. Even worse, if you try to use MBR on a 3TB drive, you will only realize about 800MB of space, not 2.2TB. That's nonsense, but this is exactly how it works. There's a way out of course - just use the latest GUID partition table (GPT), specially developed to lift restrictions of the older MBR. GPT is great, it enables to create up to 128 primary partitions (only 4 in MBR), the maximum allowed partition size is devastating 18 exabytes (only 2.2 terabytes in MBR), and it's much more reliable. But as always there's one little "no" - only Windows since Vista can boast support for it, and only 64-bit OS versions can be accommodated on GPT disks.

A New Solution from Paragon

To counteract this problem, Paragon Software has developed a unique technology that allows accommodation and successful startup of any Windows OS since Vista on a storage larger than 2.2TB in size, that is connected to a computer controlled by the old BIOS, not the new UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface). You now have the option to take advantage of modern ultra high capacity hard drives on systems that don't support it.

What makes our technology work is a mini-product called Paragon Migrate to 3TB. It bundles our improved Copy Partition/Copy HDD wizards and a special driver that grants access to all on-disk space of a 2.2TB+ system disk connected to a BIOS controlled computer. Here’s how it works:

Why Paragon Migrate to 3TB?