I would like to add a hard drive to an old machine I have running Debian, but Im afraid of running into a hard drive limit like the ATA 137 GB limit.
It seems like there are a lot of great deals on huge 200 GB Harddrives and stuff right now and that's why I would like to do this.
As far as I can tell from google, the max hd limitation of ATA is 137 GB. Is this true? So all those over 137 Gb ATA drives being sold must be used with an additional Promise card or something?
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Anonymous2006-01-01 17:23
Oh and to give you and idea on the age of the machine it is a PIII
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Anonymous2006-01-01 20:14
Yes, you almost certainly will come up against the 137GB limitation on a machine of that age because the on-board IDE controller probably won't support 48-bit LBA (required to support larger drive sizes). The only solution is to either upgrade the BIOS (highly unlikely the manufacturer will still support it though), or put in a separate, modern IDE controller card.
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Anonymous2006-01-01 22:02
True is that you are likely to run into it with an old computer. But not true is that it is a limitation of ATA, Ultra ATA supports drives of practically any size you can think of that are available for ATA right now. I run a 160gb hdd on Ultra ATA/100 without any additional cards for example. And I could run a 300gb one too, it just depends on wether your motherboard supports it or not. Which is likely a not incase of a Pentium III motherboard, UNLESS, it's a very good/recent one.
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Anonymous2006-01-02 9:01 (sage)
FWIW, my 2001 motherboard sees my 200G drive fine. Like the others have said, it all depends on your motherboard.
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Anonymous2006-01-02 9:45
PCI ATA133 controller card. $20 or thereabouts.
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Anonymous2006-01-03 5:25
Do you still need Windows XP Service Pack 2 if you buy a IDE controller card?
>>7
XP Service Pack 1 is enough, in fact, but yes - >137GB drives need to be supported in both the hardware and the operating system.
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Anonymous2006-01-03 13:24
This Limit should only go for partitions, not for the entire hd.
otherwise BIOS or IDE controller firmaware upgarde.
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Anonymous2006-01-03 20:12
>>9
Not necessarily. The IDE controller card that came with my 160 GB drive had drivers that made XP with no service packs understand the drive just fine. Granted, it appeared as a SCSI Raid device, but it worked fine.