Second hard drive: Part 2

[James Knott]

Henry Spencer wrote:
> 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. 

I find Scott Meuller's "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" to be good.


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