Surely the concept of MBR and GPT will sound familiar to you since if at some point you have installed an operating system, some of them will have appeared with total security and that is why in this article we will name their differences and important characteristics so that you can learn about them.
These two structures are partitions, they are in charge of defining the organization of the information found on the hard disk and to understand the differences it is necessary to understand what is a partition structure.
What is MBR?
Master Boot Record, this is the oldest and most compatible partition standard that we have and is used in Windows, MAC OS, Linux and other operating systems, it contains a boot manager that is used in the operating system and stores data about the partitions hard drive.
Its most important limitation is that it supports only hard drives up to 2TB and that it supports only four primary partitions.
MBR disks were created and used from the year 1983 and although it is very old, it still has limitations compared to the GPT disk, it allows among its characteristics up to 32 bits for each storage unit, which ends up limiting the maximum size of these drives to 2 TB.
It is common to create or make a Windows boot partition on this type of hard drive, where it allows you to run your operating system, or divide the disk into at least two partitions and thus have a separate file backup to the space where the operating system is stored. .
What is GPT?
When talking about a GPT partition we refer to a partition table or also called GUID partitions and this is a partitioning standard that is used to place a partition table within a hard disk.
On the hard disk there is always a partition table that is used to determine the structure of active, extended and logical partitions, as a boot code to run our operating system.
The GUID or GPT name it receives is associated with a unique global identifier for each partition (Global Unique Identifier) and the extension of the same name (GUID) is long and so much so that we could name all the existing partitions, with a unique identifier different since the limitations do not exist in this style of partition including those of the hard disk and operating system itself.
It is likely that while you learn about these technical topics and practice this topic, you will have to restore or recover a partition, because it is common for there to be an error in calculating the space of the partition.
Differences between MBR disk and GPT disk
- GPT gives us the possibility of changes, for example: the addressing system on our hard drive and it does so through LBA or logical block address with reference to the region where it finds the stored physical data, instead MBR gives us a traditional CHS system o Cylinder – Head – Sector, used to send the data addresses to the device.
- MBR has size and partition limitations as it can only create four primary partitions and no larger than 2TB each. In GPT we do not find limitations of any kind and compared to those of the operating system and hard disk.
- GPT stands out over MBR as it supports hard drives up to an approximate size of 256 TB and thus positions it as the most modern, but being only compatible with 64-bit computers and operating systems and does not have a boot code to execute a system.
- GPT has a feature that allows you to store partition table backups to avoid potential future loss and damage. You can easily divide partitions and thus organize all your content to your liking.
- MBR has an advantage over operating systems, since it was the first model to be officially presented, but being the oldest it loses support in new systems, being only compatible with Windows XP.
- Unlike GPT that currently has support for Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Linux, since it offers advantages to servers that use operating systems that require large amounts of space. You can even merge partitions to get more storage space on a single present disk, perfect for large amounts of files.