Max Drive Size Limit?

[MrMikeL]

Hi Everyone,

I have a Gateway Solo 9300 laptop, PIII 500mhz, with a 12GB HDD. I'm running Win 98 SE (may have to upgrade soon since MS is de-supporting this OS). I want to upgrade the HDD to: increase the size and increase the speed. There have been a lot of improvements in recent months, with 5400RPM not uncommon on laptop drives. There are even some 7200RPM solutions.

According to the Gateway website, my laptop can only recognize up to 32GB of HDD space. This is because of the Ultra DMA 33 interface. So my questions for all the experts are:

1. Is this true?
2. If I DID put a 40GB HDD in there (or larger), can I still reference up to 32GB of that?
3. Is there any way to get past the 32GB limit without hurting performance?

You see, there aren't many solutions at 30GB that have the faster than 4200RPM rotational speed and larger cache buffer. Those features usually start with the 40GB HDDs.

Thanks everyone!!

-Mike

[John Prophet]

good question. I think you are right about the 40g working but only seeing 32 of it. What about an external drive?

I have seen some weird things for laptops, like pcmcia cards for SATA interfaces?? weird I think, lol.

Of course they do make that bios, or used to....I forget the name of it...used to see it on desktops for using hard drives bigger than the bios allows....maybe that would work in your case.

[MrMikeL]

I haven't located a newer BIOS version for my laptop (Phoenix 16.53). I think you may be refering to BIOS overlay software which allows the use of larger partitions than the OS and BIOS allow. There's a performance penalty for that, I think.

Anyone else?

[John Prophet]

I was thinking of EZ-BIOS, a "bios overlay"..that may be the best (only?) solution in your case.

[John Prophet]

Not sure about a perf hit, but either way youd be getting the higher spindle speed of the drive no matter what. I am pretty sure it'd still be limited to ata33 though..as far as access speed..but that and spindle speed are two different issues.