I just installed a 3 TB HDD into a 990, and it works great. Dell won’t tell you this, but below is how you do it.
Install either the 1TB+ disk and install your OS, or add a 1TB+ disk as a 2nd, 3rd, ect.
The 990 Bios will still show the disk as a ~800GB disk, install your disk and OS anyway, either on the entire available space, or a specific size partition.
Install the Intel® Rapid Storage Technology software from :
This software installs the Intel drivers needed for the OS to see past the native limitation of the 990 Chipset and SATA controller.
Now if you install this on a 1TB+ disk after the OS is installed you will need to extend the partition with either the native disk tools in windows 7 or 2008. If any other OS, you will need to use a 3rd party tool like Acronis Disk Director if you are trying to have a larger C disk.
If you are adding a 2nd, 3rd ect, 1TB+ disk on a 990 you can extend the disk past the ~800GB using 3rd party software or just use diskpart after Rapid Storage is installed. Or alternatively, just install the Intel Rapid Storage tool before you install or partition the new disk.
Remember windows has a 2TB partition size limit unless you initialize a 2TB+ disk as GPT, with GPT you can go past this 2TB limit.
Hope this helps anyone that is looking to add a large disk to a new Optiplex 990
Jon
Morjo15
Keywords
Intel Rapid Storage Technology
Optiplex 990 , 3TB, 2TB, terabyte, Large Disk Support, Limitation, Limit,
This worked on my i7 Optiplex 990. The only note was that I had to changed the SATA operations from RAID to AHCI, which is something I had not tried prior to installing Intel RST. After that it works fine.
DELL-Chris M
Community Manager
•
56.9K Posts
1
May 8th, 2011 11:00
copenhaus,
The largest we validated were -
0HF1N 1TB S2, 7.2K, 3.5", Hitachi Jupiter
5JN00 1TB S2, 7.2K, 3.5", Samsung F3
897TK 1TB S2, 7.2K, 3.5", Western Digital XL500
H652R 1TB S2, 7.2K, 3.5", Seagate Pharoah
MorJo15
42 Posts
1
September 20th, 2011 16:00
I just installed a 3 TB HDD into a 990, and it works great. Dell won’t tell you this, but below is how you do it.
Install either the 1TB+ disk and install your OS, or add a 1TB+ disk as a 2nd, 3rd, ect.
The 990 Bios will still show the disk as a ~800GB disk, install your disk and OS anyway, either on the entire available space, or a specific size partition.
Install the Intel® Rapid Storage Technology software from :
downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx I used Version 10.1.0.1008
This software installs the Intel drivers needed for the OS to see past the native limitation of the 990 Chipset and SATA controller.
Now if you install this on a 1TB+ disk after the OS is installed you will need to extend the partition with either the native disk tools in windows 7 or 2008. If any other OS, you will need to use a 3rd party tool like Acronis Disk Director if you are trying to have a larger C disk.
If you are adding a 2nd, 3rd ect, 1TB+ disk on a 990 you can extend the disk past the ~800GB using 3rd party software or just use diskpart after Rapid Storage is installed. Or alternatively, just install the Intel Rapid Storage tool before you install or partition the new disk.
Remember windows has a 2TB partition size limit unless you initialize a 2TB+ disk as GPT, with GPT you can go past this 2TB limit.
Hope this helps anyone that is looking to add a large disk to a new Optiplex 990
Jon
Morjo15
Keywords
Intel Rapid Storage Technology
Optiplex 990 , 3TB, 2TB, terabyte, Large Disk Support, Limitation, Limit,
Mike Huckaby
5 Posts
1
November 25th, 2011 07:00
This worked on my i7 Optiplex 990. The only note was that I had to changed the SATA operations from RAID to AHCI, which is something I had not tried prior to installing Intel RST. After that it works fine.