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GB Limit for USB hard drive

M

mithrandir2001

Diamond Member
I just ordered a 160GB USB 2.0 external hard drive from newegg and now I've been thinking...

Will my PC be able to recognize the drive as 160GB or will it be something less? I know that there's a 137GB limit for IDE drives in some form. Does this matter for USB?

I have an old machine: a 440BX motherboard with a Promise Ultra100 TX2 controller and a Zonex PCI USB 2.0 card.
 
Hmm, found this on a Microsoft site:

Q: Does usbstor.sys need to be modified to support disks over 137 GB in size?
No. Support for disks that are larger than 137 GB is not an issue for the USB mass storage class driver. However, such support is an issue with the USB-ATA bridge chip in the external USB storage device.

USB-ATA bridge chip vendors are working on new devices that support the 48-bit ATA LBA mode. When these devices are available, the storage limit on a single device should be 2048 GB.

I guess I won't have a problem.
 
yea, USB storage is only limited on the ATA to USB bridges ability to address the memory. the enclosure will list its highest capacity ability in its features.
 
F.Y.I. - my 160GB works fine with my LavaLink Firewire enclosure. So the 137GB limitation doesn't apply to either Firewire or USB2.0
 
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