Big Storage Fun

So, a while ago I had some problems with my RAID stack that turned out to be a power supply issue. I went and got a new power supply, which fixed the RAID. The whole incident got me thinking about storage. In an attempt to not freak out when my RAID blows up again, I got two Samsung 1.5TB hard drives to stick in two machines. I mean, hell, adding a hard drive is simple, right?

Well, not so much. Turns out there's a bit of a odd wrinkle when your drives get big. In my attempt to be of use and service to the community, I am passing along this bit of wisdom. Some Nvidia SATA drivers have a problem recognizing more than 1.1 TB of a drive. The symptom manifests during format. You tell the drive to format, and it hangs around the 1.1 TB mark. The solution is to force update your SATA drivers. The problem manifests under Vista 64-bit. So if by some odd chance, your hard drive format hangs, it's something you might consider doing.