Laptop hard drive limit?

[superfastkyle]

Does anyone know what the next logical hard drive limit is for laptops? I would love to put my whole cd collection on my laptop. Seagate seems to be releasing 160gb soon. Will it work on my latop Toshiba L25-1193? 100gb drives are getting somewhat cheap now and I dont know if I'm wasting my time waiting for a drive that won't even work.

 

[21stHermit]

Since laptops use the NTFS file system, there is no practical limit. NTFS allows many TerraBytes of addressable space. When we'll see TB lappy HD's is anybody's guess. If you were to use FAT32 instead of NTFS, then the limit is 132GB and we're essentially there now.

Hermit

 

[RobsTV]

You can use Fat32 with any size drive.
Just use multiple partitions, which you should always use anyways.

 

[superfastkyle]

ok thanks for your replies, just didnt know if there was a 127gb limit or similar like there was in desktops

 

[fbrdphreak]

No logical limit, only a physical one. 2.5" isn't much space to fit all those bits in, so for a long time 100GB was the ceiling. 120GB is common now, Fujitsu has a 160GB out, and with Perpendicular recording becoming mainstream in 2006 we'll see 200GB+ by 2007 I'd bet.

 

[corkyg]

Some older laptops do have a BIOS limit. I am currently running 100 GB in mine - and if 160 GB bubbles up - it will be no problem. I'll just clone the drive and swap it.

 

[imported_goku]

Originally posted by: RobsTV
You can use Fat32 with any size drive.
Just use multiple partitions, which you should always use anyways.

Fat 32 has a 2 TB limit and I've heard of many issues with really large drives and FAT 32. Fat 32 gets real innefficent with space as you scale up past 32GB or so with cluster sizes of 32KB. NTFS can do 4KB/512bye clusters with just about any sized drive.