GPT vs MBR Disk Comparison
Windows GPT Disks – Is Bigger Really Better?
Introduction
The Microsoft Windows operating system offers 2 architectures for partitioning disk drives into usable areas to store data. The 2 approaches differ with how they track the mapping of physical disk sectors to logical block numbers. The original method of partitioning disks is referred to as MBR (Master Boot Record) which was developed during the 1980’s. Although widely accepted, this scheme has many shortcomings including partitions being limited to 2TB (terabytes) in size.
As disk capacity has increased to over a terabyte, a new partition architecture developed in the late 1990’s called GPT (GUID Partition Table) was created to accommodate the larger partition sizes. In addition to size, GPT disks also offer more partitions and greater resilience to corruption. This article examines MBR and GPT-based Windows disks discussing, their benefits and disadvantages….