Alongside the increased security, the greater storage capacity has also been a key factor in the development of GPT as a successor for MBR. It’s true that for many decades that was more than enough, but nowadays it is too small even for standard drives used by private users.
Anyone wanting to set up more than four areas has to use “extended partitions”, and although these can be split up into as many “logical partitions” as desired, the resulting memory structure is complex, and hardware faults can quickly lead to data loss.Īnother even more obvious problem with the traditional partitioning concept is that MBR partitions can only be used on hard drives or storage devices up to 2 terabytes (2,000 gigabytes). The MBR partition style shaped computer technology for many years, but it nonetheless has some significant limitations which meant it was only a matter of time before a successor came along.įor example, right from the beginning, one of the key weaknesses of the Master Boot Record was that the technology only supports four primary partitions.
