After expanding a hardware RAID-5 array to 10 TB, a technician presents the new virtual disk to a Windows Server 2019 file server. Disk Management shows one basic disk that is online with 9.1 TB of unallocated space, but the New Simple Volume Wizard refuses to create a volume larger than 2 048 GB. Which misconfiguration is most likely causing the size limitation?
The hardware RAID controller's write-back cache is disabled.
The disk was initialized with the Master Boot Record (MBR) partition style instead of GUID Partition Table (GPT).
The array is configured to use 512-byte emulation (512e) sectors rather than native 4 KB sectors.
The volume was formatted with the exFAT file system instead of NTFS.
Master Boot Record (MBR) uses 32-bit LBA addressing, which can map at most 4,294,967,295 sectors. On disks that use the traditional 512-byte sector size that translates to a maximum addressable capacity of about 2 TB. If a disk larger than 2 TB is initialized as MBR, Windows can allocate partitions only within the first 2 TB and leaves the rest of the space unusable. Re-initializing the disk as a GUID Partition Table (GPT) disk removes the 2 TB barrier, allowing the full 9 TB RAID volume to be partitioned and formatted. None of the other configuration issues listed (file-system choice, RAID-controller cache settings, or 512e sector format) imposes a strict 2 TB partition limit in Windows Server 2019, so they would not prevent the creation of a single 6 TB or larger volume.