What is the EIDE HDD Size limit?

[guitronics]

Howdy y'all:

I read somewhere that IDE has a limitation of 137 GB. I see where there are 160 GB. Drives available.....so.....Is it the Motherboard's BIOS that's the limiting factor, the IDE controller, or what?

Let me be more specific.I'm gonna buy a new Motherboard,Hard Drives(2),and all the assorted parts to make a monster music (WAV) recording workstation.

If I want to use 1 Channel to boot from,I'd want to take 2- 160 GB Drives,and make 1 master, the other slave.That leaves me the other IDE channel for CD-Rom and CD-R...another master/slave setup.

Depending on the Motherboard....Will I be able to utilize the full capacity of the drives?
I'm talking about a newer-issue Motherbd.

I'd think that based on the availibility of 160 Gb. Drives, that newer-released Mobo's would support them. I could be wrong!

 

[AndyHui]

Depends.

If the motherboard BIOS or IDE Controller implements the ATA133 standard, or has the 48-bit LBA addressing, the 128GB limit is not longer a barrier.

ATA133 already includes 48-bit LBA addressing, but 48-bit addressing can be implemented separately, such that ATA100 motherboards and/or controllers can address drives larger than 128GB.

EG:
If you purchase an ATA133 controller, it automatically has support for "giant drives".

If you purchase an ASUS P4T-E (which uses the ICH2 ATA100 Controller), if you upgrade to the latest BIOS, version 1005, 48-bit addressing is included, meaning that you can also use "giant drives".

 

[InsaneMorphius]

I just recently bought a Maxtor 160GB HDD,

According to maxtor, the windows limitation is 137GB. But by using the supplied PCI card, I was able to use the entire 160GB by itself with no extra partitions. The only drawback to this is you cannot use windows to run scandisk or defragment cause of the windows size limitations. If you were to partition it, then you would have no problem using the supplied windows stuff.

I do believe that you can do what you are trying to do.

You WILL need to FDISK the drives, do not use the maxblast software cause it will not work on these big drives.

 

[JonnyDuke]

As the other two have said I don't see a problem with what you are going to attempt, as I'm sure you will be using newer equipment right? My Q is this: Are you going to be ripping and burning at the same time? If so then you should put the Reader and the Burner on separate IDE channels.

 

[Mavrick007]

<< I just recently bought a Maxtor 160GB HDD,

According to maxtor, the windows limitation is 137GB. But by using the supplied PCI card, I was able to use the entire 160GB by itself with no extra partitions. The only drawback to this is you cannot use windows to run scandisk or defragment cause of the windows size limitations. If you were to partition it, then you would have no problem using the supplied windows stuff.

I do believe that you can do what you are trying to do.

You WILL need to FDISK the drives, do not use the maxblast software cause it will not work on these big drives. >>



If Windows had a limitation, how would it work just with Maxtor's software since it's still operating in Windows? Maybe it's just cause the onboard controller is only ata100 and anything larger than 137Gigs requires ata133, or at least any partition larger than 137Gigs.

 

[Pariah]

As stated before you need to get a hold of an ATA133 controller, either onboard or addin. Rather then limiting yourself on MB choices, make sure one of the Maxtor's you buy is a retail version, it comes bundled with an addin controller which will give you more flexibility.

There is no windows drive size limit. The only limit placed on drive size within a windows environment is by the file system you use. Since both FAT32 and NTFS can address multi-terabyte drives, it's not really a limit. The 128GB size limit is imposed by the ATA spec using 28bits to address sectors.

 

[samgau]

I used the Max blast software with my new 80 gb drive + ata133 card... didn't have any problems partitioning it... fdisk on the other hand would only see a 10gb drive... scared me for a sec until I tried the max blast... the controller card did detect the drive fine though...

just my 2c

 

[guitronics]

My Thanks to one and all. As usual in forums, when a question is submitted; you get a variety of opinions and answers. These are all valid, as the questioner (Me); gets feedback from a variety of sources.

I can see right now that I'll need to get the drive in retail form,if I don't have a 'board with native ATA/IDE 133 support (in order to get the controller card).

Once again, thanks, guys.