HDD IDE Drive Support Greater Than 137 GB

[Etruscan]

I have a mainboard I want to add a large drive to. I was thinking of something in the 200 to 300 GB range. I need to carry a lot of data around in small portable package.

What I was wondering was: whether anyone knew what the new limit on HDD size is after the 137GB barrier? My BIOS supports drives over 137, but nowhere can I find just how large a drive I can buy and still be supported.

[daveleau]

I believe the next limit is the 3 or 4 terabyte limit. I can't find that anywhere, but I remember hearing that somewhere. I am interested to see if that is the case.

[Telexen]

It's probably far more than any drive you can buy...what is your board though?

[John Prophet]

Im not sure about all of the drives, but the maxtors I have seen come with a ATA133 controller card that allows the use of the larger than 137g drive. If not you can find the cards all over anandtech "for sale/trade" forum. Or maybe here on our "sale/trade" forum.

JP

[Etruscan]

The board I want to use is an ECS K7SEM and it supports drives greater than 137, so I don't need a controller card. I guess your right. It makes sense daveleau and Telexen. Most drives for sale are between 40 and 120 GB: under the limit. Then there are 160s and 200s and 250s. These must all be supported or they wouldn't sell them. It was the new 320GB Maxtor that made the question pop to mind and, not wanting to sit around here reasoning, I thought I'd go to the forum and ask.

In reality, I probably won't be able to afford a really big drive anyway and 120 will get the job done. But a large drivre would be so luxurious... you know.

[Nighthawk]

Since all the previous jumps have been 4x the space (2gb->8gb->32gb), I'm guessing that it would be around 512GB.

The thing that interests me is that the current limit is at 137GB instead of 128GB, considering you can't just add some bits and get that number..

[elroy]

To natively support 137gb+ you must have an ATA133 capable motherboard. If your motherboard doesn't support ATA133 then you must install a controller card. The next size limitation is way larger than any currently available drives.

[dauss]

This is a sum of the problem. there are 2 ways around this problem. You need a new controller card, or install Intel Application Accelerator 2.3 Beta or higher. I'm not sure if that program works on an AMD computer, but it worked on my P4 computer. I bought a 200 gig drive and was recognized after I formatted it.
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc....cGFnZT0x&p_li=
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc....cGFnZT0x&p_li=

[Peter M]

Originally posted by elroy
To natively support 137gb+ you must have an ATA133 capable motherboard. If your motherboard doesn't support ATA133 then you must install a controller card. The next size limitation is way larger than any currently available drives.

.

No. UDMA-133 and large drive support are NOT AT ALL RELATED.

48-bit LBA addressing is what you need - and this can be done on any generation IDE channel, even on an old 286 box if you want to. The key is in BIOS supporting this access mode, and in your operating system supporting it.

The answer to the original question lies herein too - maximum capacity is 2^48 sectors or 2^57 bytes, which would translate to 128 petabytes. That should do for a while.

[Etruscan]

I don't know why people are posting that I need a controller card "to get around this problem". There is no problem. As I said, the ECS K7SEM supports drives larger than 137 - period. The question I asked was: what is the upper limit of drives beyond the 137GB limit? Now nobody seems to know exactly - except Peter M. What is good to know is that it is a way larger than 320GB the current "largest" IDE drive. What is a little baffling is I'll need a dictionary and my old math text to figure out what a petabyte is. As long as it doesn't involve too much long division, I should be all right. Thanks everyone.