PS2 Technical limiting factor for 2tb HDD despite 48-bit LBA?

[kalm_traveler]

Hi everyone - I've been digging through posts but haven't been able to find a concrete answer so I figured I'd make an account and just ask.

I see going back into the 20xx years people mentioning a 2TB limit for internal SSDs with the PS2 APA format, but I'm not able to find the reason for this.

As far as I understand, 48-bit LBA should allow addressing up to 144 Petabytes?

Also I see that MBR partition tables only support up to 2TB partitions - maybe this is where the old limit mentioned came from?

Assuming that MBR partition size is the factor, couldn't you just make multiple 2TB partitions on a larger drive to get around that?

Or is there some other factor causing this 2TB limitation?

 

[Berion]

PS2 firmware not understand MBR but APA.

Limit came from 32bit addressing AFAIR. So new drivers are needed.

It is not limit of partition but drive.

 

[kalm_traveler]

PS2 firmware not understand MBR but APA.

Limit came from 32bit addressing AFAIR. So new drivers are needed.

It is not limit of partition but drive.

Ah I searched more and understand now...

APA "Aligned Partition Allocation" scheme sort of supports LBA48 but can only actually work with 32-bit addresses, which is where that 2TB limit comes from so there's no way to exceed that since it is an inherent detail of the partition type.