Second hard drive: Part 2

[Henry Spencer]

On Wed, 1 Oct 2003, Phillip Mills wrote:
> went shopping yesterday and the first person I talked to who sounded 
> knowledgeable said that a current 40GB drive would *probably* work, but 
> larger ones might not be recognized by the IDE controller.  My user 
> manual says the Dell uses ATA-33 (which I assume matches the 33Mhz PCI 
> bus speed), while current drives all refer to ATA-133...

There are actually two separate issues here.

"ATA-33", "ATA-133", etc., are about the ATA transfer speed.  That is not
a compatibility worry, because it's pretty much all backward-compatible: 
an old controller talking to a new drive won't get the higher speed that
the new drive is capable of, but it *will* cope.

The problem with really big drives is that the old IDE standard simply did
not envision drives bigger than 128GB -- it runs out of bits in its block
numbers.  This became an issue only a couple of years ago, and a machine
that's 3-4yr old almost certainly has this limit.  You *can* put a bigger
drive on an old interface... but only the first 128GB will be accessible. 
There is no workaround.

(There are sometimes lower limits due to stupidities in old BIOSes, old
operating systems, etc.)

> So, as usual, the more I think about PC hardware, the more confused I 
> become.

Run, do not walk, to your local technical bookstore (the U of T Bookstore
is a reasonable choice) and buy Thompson&Thompson's "PC Hardware in a
Nutshell", 2nd ed.  It's not quite perfect -- and since it's a year old,
it's already behind the times in some areas -- but it's human-readable and
is the very best reference on the subject. 

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org



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