One of the most underreported stories of the year—heck, of the past decade—is the looming storage crisis. For as long as hardware manufacturers have been making hard drives, there's been nothing to stop them from increasing areal densities and discovering other techniques to make them bigger and bigger year after year. But 2010 marks the point where all that has changed: The introduction of 2.5- and 3-terabyte (TB) hard drives means the traditional rules no longer apply because the traditional computers can no longer read all the drives. (For more information, see our article, "The Problem with Big Hard Drives.") Just as soon as the problem has reared its end, one jerry-rigged solution has already appeared—from Asus. The company that ignited the netbook craze and has for years been manufacturing many enthusiasts' favorite motherboards, video cards, and other components has developed a way for owners of Asus motherboards to use all the space on drives larger than 2.19TB—even if their operating system and hardware makeup should make that impossible.
The answer comes in the form of a free 5MB download called Disk Unlocker. When installed, it will recognize and manipulate a too-large drive in a way that any XP, Vista, or Windows 7 computer can understand. That means your system's motherboard doesn't need to be equipped with UEFI rather than BIOS, you don't need to use a separate adapter card (like the kind Western Digital is shipping with its new 2.5- and 3TB Caviar Green drives), and your drive can be formatted with MBR rather than GUID Partition Table. In other words, whether you're using an internal or an external drive, all the limitations you thought were hobbling the newest and largest drives on the market no longer apply.
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