Adding two 2TB drives to Raspbian

Ok gais, so I learned that pi's can't handle partitions bigger than 2TB. I have two 2TB external drives and I'm wondering....is there any way to like keep both plugged in but unmount one and mount the other when switching to using the other one? So far, I've noticed whether they're mounted or not, the pi makes a struggling noise (since I also learned the reasoning is pi's don't have enough power control for it). I also do have a huge 5TB drive that has it's own power source. Even then, the pi won't accept higher than 2TB partitions.

So all-in-all, can I keep both (2TB) plugged in and mount one or the other when using them respectively?

Be careful what you think you know. It is too common to concentrate (wrongly) on the symptom rather than the real problem. I would be mighty surprised if whatever distro you are running oops; raspbian doesn't support gpt disks, and thus very large partitions.

As for running the two disks, unmounting won't stop the power draw unless you can spin them right down - might be difficult on USB, but I don't know. I use a couple of "button" USB sticks on mine, but for real disks I would use external power.

Depending on which O/S you are running on your RPi, if it is Raspbian, that is Debian based, so supports all sizes of disks as you would expect.

The RPi does not have a lot of power available from its USB sockets, so you will be better off running external disks with their own power supply.

(I have used a powered USB hub to power my RPi3B & a couple of HDDs.)

Hmm...I'm pretty sure when I originally kept trying to mount it, it straight up said it doesn't support bigger than 2TB but I'll try it again just to make sure. So using my 5TB external with it's own power source, (supposing 2TB is the most you can use) would I just be able to make 3 partitions and not unmount the whole drive, but just switch from partition to partition?

You should be able to boot up your RPi, attach a powered external drive, of any size, & mount it.

If it hasn't been partitioned, & had a file system put onto it, you will need to do so first, I suggest ext4.

probably I'm wrong, but maybe it depends on the OS. If you have a 32bit OS you cannot have more than 2 TB.
If you wish to use (for example) 5 TB you may need to install a 64bit OS, but the "default" raspbian is a 32bit system. If I remember well.

Originally Posted by kegabyte Ok gais, so I learned that pi's can't handle partitions bigger than 2TB. ... I also do have a huge 5TB drive that has it's own power source. Even then, the pi won't accept higher than 2TB partitions.

I don't know about two drives, but I had a 3TB drive with its own power source connected to an aging Raspberry Pi running Raspbian (a B model if I am not wrong, and now replaced by an Odroid). It had no problem mounting an NTFS partition (so that I can connect the drive to Windows PCs if necessary) that spanned the entire drive.

The drive is noisy, and as svg00 says it doesn't spin down when it's unmounted. I only need it once a day for backing up and use a small program named hd-idle to stop it when not in use.

Oh ok, I doubt The Pi3 has 64 bit capabilities, huh?

it has a 64bit CPU with 4 cores.

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