How big hdd can I use on my motherboard?

[Birger]

I have an Asus A7V266-E motherboard with the VIA KT266A chipset and I wonder if someone of you knows anything about how big harddisks I can use with the integrated IDE controller on my motherboard?

Can I use those "cool" 250 Gb hdds or is the limit for me only around 137 Gb?

Btw, I got the 1015 Beta 2 Bios.

 

[Peter007]

NO, but you should be able to get by with a 120G max
80G for sure

 

[Viper96720]

Not sure if it can see the whole 250GB. But couldn't you just partition the drive in 1/2 or something.

 

[Peter]

Partitioning doesn't help if the board's BIOS doesn't know how to access beyond 128 GiB (that's 137 marketing gigabytes). Check with the vendor - it's not like ASUS have gone bankrupt, is it?

 

[Viper96720]

Oh i thought if the drive was partioned have a C,D,E it would see each one as a seperate drive. 120GB max for a SoyoKT-266A. Asus didn't have any info for their version.

 

[Peter]

No. This is about accessing the drive on a physical layer. Neither the drive nor the BIOS care the least bit about the drive's contents, and that of course includes the partitioning and file systems. To the drive and BIOS, it's all just sectors, numbered from 0 to X. The limit is in how big X may become. With normal LBA mode, X < 2^28, to go beyond, 48-bit LBA is required and lets X go up to 2^48 -1.