Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, morphine, Steel
Arvald wrote:I believe that you answered your own question. If you install a $90 3.0 TB drive or two, GPT is what you need.For a standard user... benefit to GPT... allowing partition sizes of over 2.2 TB.
Arvald wrote:Does anyone know of a feature that the standard home user (or even home power user) would benefit from in a non-server environment?
Ryu Connor wrote:Arvald wrote:Does anyone know of a feature that the standard home user (or even home power user) would benefit from in a non-server environment?
Faster boot, better security, and better fault tolerance.
Windows 8 defaults to creating GPT disks on a UEFI system during install; regardless of disk size. The installer is not going to ask you if you want GPT or not.
just brew it! wrote:AFAIK the better security part is only true if you also have Secure Boot enabled. I agree it should be more fault tolerant, as there are multiple copies of the partition table.
JBI wrote:Given that the OP has expressed a desire to multi-boot older/alternative OSes, the disadvantages almost certainly outweigh any advantages in his case.
JBI wrote:As an aside, I *really* wish OSes would *not* silently default to GPT on UEFI systems. You should be prompted, or at the very least there should be an "expert" mode which allows you to override this behavior. This "GPT on UEFI" rule is in fact what tripped me up on my Ubuntu RAID-1 install a few weeks ago (Ubuntu also uses GPT if it detects a UEFI BIOS, but UEFI+GPT apparently doesn't play nice with their software RAID-1 implementation without some manual tweaking).
Ryu Connor wrote:I just realized I forgot another benefit of GPT. More than four primary partitions.
Ryu Connor wrote:MBR viruses apparently don't work either. Albeit getting additional details about that has been difficult.
JBI wrote:Given that the OP has expressed a desire to multi-boot older/alternative OSes, the disadvantages almost certainly outweigh any advantages in his case.
JBI wrote:As an aside, I *really* wish OSes would *not* silently default to GPT on UEFI systems. You should be prompted, or at the very least there should be an "expert" mode which allows you to override this behavior. This "GPT on UEFI" rule is in fact what tripped me up on my Ubuntu RAID-1 install a few weeks ago (snip)
Ryu Connor wrote:(Snipped away info about BIOS/GPT and UEFI/MBR hybridding. See above) I just realized I forgot another benefit of GPT. More than four primary partitions.
BIF wrote:I like the Secure Boot and REF options and I think I would like to implement them later this year.
just brew it! wrote:BIF wrote:I like the Secure Boot and REF options and I think I would like to implement them later this year.
Just keep in mind that (as Forge noted) having a UEFI BIOS does not automatically mean you've got Secure Boot support. Check the motherboard manual...
hhhoudini wrote:just brew it! wrote:BIF wrote:I like the Secure Boot and REF options and I think I would like to implement them later this year.
Just keep in mind that (as Forge noted) having a UEFI BIOS does not automatically mean you've got Secure Boot support. Check the motherboard manual...
I have a ASUS P9X79 Pro board and the secure boot option showed up in the newer 'bios' updates. If you use UEFI to set up your boot options, you may lose them when you update your UEFI 'bios', so document your boot set up.
Just as a side note, I have never seen any motherboard that I have owned or worked with go through so many 'bios' versions. Probably an indication of how new and troublesome the UEFI buisiness is.
harry
hhhoudini wrote:Just as a side note, I have never seen any motherboard that I have owned or worked with go through so many 'bios' versions. Probably an indication of how new and troublesome the UEFI buisiness is.
BIF wrote:Does anybody know...if my Windows drives are all GPT, will I be able to plug in a drive with MBR partitions so that I can copy the contents from the old drive to the new SSDs or the new HDD (those new drives being GPT) under Windows 8? I have tons of sample data that will need to be copied over from old SATA drives or USB drives. I'm thinking this should not be a problem or else nobody would be able to fully reconstruct their systems, right?
Ryu Connor wrote:GPT and MBR can freely mix.
BIF wrote:Hi again!
BIF wrote:Windows 8 Pro will be a fresh install. I'll play with it a bit and if things are futzy, I'll reinstall BEFORE I start adding too many applications.
BIF wrote:Forge, that was my first suspicion too; your comment about "quietly failing" in the background. Maybe the first issuance of TRIM under 3.2 caused your drive to have to work through a big backlog of prior failed attempts? If so, then subsequent issuances may not take quite so long.
BIF wrote:JBI, I'm not going to implement secure boot just yet, but I know that the partitions need to be in GPT and the motherboard needs to be running in UEFI, so those are my first steps.
Forge wrote:I hope you're not offended, but I have no idea why you'd want to do this. So-called "Secure Boot" is one of the most shameless and overt attempts at hardware-enforced vendor lockin I've ever seen. I sincerely doubt it'll add anything to security, and it certainly does make you an MS-only operation for a while to come.
Forge wrote:About GPT and non-boot disks: I really, really wouldn't bother. As others have mentioned, GPT and MBR both read fine in recent systems, and the benefits of GPT over MBR diminish when it's not a booting disk. I rarely want to read any of my disks from an XP32 system, but I like knowing that I can, in a pinch. My first fully-GPT-only, multi-disk system is still in the future, and I'd guess a few years away at least.
Ryu Connor wrote:Forge wrote:I hope you're not offended, but I have no idea why you'd want to do this. So-called "Secure Boot" is one of the most shameless and overt attempts at hardware-enforced vendor lockin I've ever seen. I sincerely doubt it'll add anything to security, and it certainly does make you an MS-only operation for a while to come.
Similar concept as a TPM module. Nothing nefarious to see here. Is real security.
Was not created by MS was created by the UEFI Forum.