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Disadvantages of GPT?



 
 
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  #1  
Old August 14th 17, 12:36 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
JJ[_11_]
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Posts: 744
Default Disadvantages of GPT?

There are many good articles on the net which describe the advantages of GPT
over MBR, but none of that I've read describe its disadvantages well.

What I've known about the disadvantages of GPT are those when using GPT.
i.e. not the GPT itself. e.g.:

- Compatibility with older utility softwares. e.g. boot managers, partition
managers, etc.

- There's still lack of recovery software which is specialized in GPT
structure recovery.

The only disadvantage of the GPT itself that I know for sure is that the
overhead of GPT is larger than MBR. Mainly due to the fact that it uses
64-bit values.

The other probable disadvantages is that the GPT partition type GUIDs may
not cover all of the know MBR partition types. e.g. Novell Netware (when the
GPT has a protective MBR to boot into that OS) - whether the GPT partition
type actually matters or not.

So, is there any other disadvantages of the GPT itself? e.g. minimum
partition size would be larger than MBR's. Or, the partition alignment of
GPT would be larger than MBR. etc.
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  #2  
Old August 14th 17, 01:57 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
Paul[_32_]
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Posts: 11,873
Default Disadvantages of GPT?

JJ wrote:
There are many good articles on the net which describe the advantages of GPT
over MBR, but none of that I've read describe its disadvantages well.

What I've known about the disadvantages of GPT are those when using GPT.
i.e. not the GPT itself. e.g.:

- Compatibility with older utility softwares. e.g. boot managers, partition
managers, etc.

- There's still lack of recovery software which is specialized in GPT
structure recovery.

The only disadvantage of the GPT itself that I know for sure is that the
overhead of GPT is larger than MBR. Mainly due to the fact that it uses
64-bit values.

The other probable disadvantages is that the GPT partition type GUIDs may
not cover all of the know MBR partition types. e.g. Novell Netware (when the
GPT has a protective MBR to boot into that OS) - whether the GPT partition
type actually matters or not.

So, is there any other disadvantages of the GPT itself? e.g. minimum
partition size would be larger than MBR's. Or, the partition alignment of
GPT would be larger than MBR. etc.


The parameters used in the GPT, must be sized for the job. GUIDs are
128 bits, in an attempt to avoid collisions (just like all the other
GUIDs the system uses, like CLSIDs). LBAs need to be 64-bits, so a decent
sized disk (in sectors) can be defined.

As far as I know, alignment is on 1MB boundaries, just like the Vista (or later)
alignment of MBR partitions.

I don't really have any good tools for GPT. So I hope
something doesn't break. A "good" tool to me, is a
tool that can state disk values in exact numbers of
bytes. fsutil can give some info, but I really need
something better than that.

My GPT disks here, generally have only one partition. I would
use a byte offset method to work with the partition, if all else
failed. I would guess an NTFS header would be relatively close
to the beginning of the disk, and searching for "NTFS" with a
hex editor would find it. But I cannot say I have a strong
workflow after that. I'm pretty well dead in the water if
it breaks. I don't even know if TestDisk will scan for GPT.

And the disks with GPT on them here, are big enough, I
don't really want to work on them. It takes hours and hours
to do the most trivial thing. You have to put a lot of effort
into planning, to get anything done. This is a result of disk
size expanding faster than I/O speed, so it takes more and more
hours to do anything.

Paul
 




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