Second hard drive: Part 2

[Phillip Mills]

On Wednesday, October 1, 2003, at 03:16 PM, Henry Spencer wrote:

> "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.

That's the paragraph I wanted to see!  Thank you.  (So the comment 
about limited backward compatibility -- for 40GB only -- was just 
noise, I can assume?)

> 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.

Therefore dropping in a current-model 80GB should pose no mismatch-type 
problems.


In reference to some of the other discussion....  I have the system 
manual and specifications that came with the machine and it mentions 
very little about the EIDE interface, just the ATA-33 thing, some about 
the physical connections, and nothing about size limits.  The primary 
hard drive identifies on boot as a Quantum Fireball LM30.0.  (I've 
typically had good luck with Quantum or IBM drives in my Macs.)

Thanks to all for the comments.

........................
Phillip Mills
Multi-platform software development
(416) 224-0714

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