Hard drives

["Keith Doxey" <ukha@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

Forgive what may be a stupid question but I am confused by the current
selection of hard drives available.

Drives >120gb seem to be very cheap now but what are the limitations on
using these?

If the machine BIOS cant support a vey big drive, would fitting a PCI IDE
controller card overcome the problem?

I seem to remember something about Windows not recognising large drives as
well until something or other was done. What ?

Tha machine I want to build will have a motherboard that is a few years old
so I am not sure what maximum size it can support.

In the past I have hit limits twice :-(

I bought a 13.5Gb drive and the mobo would only see it as 8.4Gb
A while later I got a new motherboard and could then use all 13.5Gb Then I
bought a 40Gb drive and it refused to boot unless I fitted the 32Gb limit
jumper on the drive.

I would hate to buy a big drive and find that I couldnt use it all.

BTW, I am referring to ATA drives here.

The only machine I have with SATA is the Dell £99 Server. Do the same large
disk problems also occur with SATA ?

Regards

Keith