This has probably been answered before, but if it was I missed it.
If I reformat my Drobo to 16 TB partition on a Win7 machine, then plug it into an XP machine, will it keep its 16 TB patition?
No.
It won’t mount.
XP can only see volumes as large as 2TB.
Thank you.
I actually connected my 16TB Drobo to an XP 32-bit machine by accident once. It doesn’t hurt anything (as long as you don’t try to format or mess with the disk manager) but also doesn’t mount, so pretty useless.
It was an “Oh yeah… I remember that” moment and I hooked it back up to my DroboShare (before I got my current Win7 machine that currently shares the Drobo).
XP’s NTFS driver simply lacks the modernization to deal with 16TB NTFS volumes.
It is not a NTFS problem, but rather disk partition table problem.
XP supports only MBR table, but MBR has a limit of 2TB. To use larger volumes another partition table is needed, in this case it is GPT.
Ahh, you’re right! I read that somewhere, then forgot. 