I'm getting ready to upgrade my MBP 2.16 with a 500Gb drive. I know that if you want to use a 1TB external drive you have to pull a little trick in Disk Utility to get the Mac to recognise the full 1TB, I just wondered if you have to do the same thing with a 500Gb internal drive?
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Do I have to pull the Disk Utility trick if I install a 500Gb drive in a MBP?
- Thread starter AVR2
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What trick? You never need to pull a trick to get it to recognize the full value of a drive.*
*There was a time 8 years ago when some controllers couldn't recognize >128GB but this was a hardware limit, not a software one and hasn't been an issue in many many years.
*There was a time 8 years ago when some controllers couldn't recognize >128GB but this was a hardware limit, not a software one and hasn't been an issue in many many years.
I was misremembering - there's actually a known issue with Leopard which can cause problems when you try to format a drive 500Gb or larger - OS X will let you format it as FAT32 (or NTFS, if you have a driver for it) but not HFS+.
The Apple Knowledgebase solution is here, and I guess I may be affected by it. Essentially, you have to partition the disk, not simply erase it.
It would seem that you have your answer.
Thanks for the info, I'll be looking at installing a 500GB drive in my MBP in the near future and may well need to know this.