.. it seems it's still not possible to connect drives larger than 2TB directly to any Intel southbridge controller (in my case, the most recent one: ICH-10R) and use it in ACHI mode ..
That must be a MS-Windows restriction. We don't have that restriction with Linux.
There are two different limitations that come into play when going above 2TB:
1. The old MBR setup caps out at ~2TB. This is what commonly causes problems on the OS side unless the user has switched to GUID based partitioning.
2. LBA addressing is also capped at ~2TB with older Command Descriptor Block size. While drives are switching to 4k sectors, this is an on platter change only, the downstream pieces still talk in 512bytes per address for compatibility reasons. CDB was previously limited to 10 bytes, with 4 bytes of that dedicated to the LBA. 4 byte LBA address (4,294,967,296) * 512 byte sectors = LBA address limit capped at ~2.1TB.
The fix for #2 is to shift to Long LBA, which at a minimum doubles the LBA address block to 8 bytes.
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