Hard Disk Size Limit

luki

Is it true what I've been told that a Mac cannot handle a hard disk over 137GB? Is this true of the G4 towers now shipping? Are there any workarounds? I have a 200GB drive that I'd love to install for video work.



Any advice/information will be greatly appreciated.

microtrash

The MDD G4 (the one shipping and introduced this august) can handle large drive (137GB+) for sure, and maybe the 2002 Quicksilver. Hope this will help



[ 01-03-2003: Message edited by: microtrash ]</p>

luca

It's not because PowerMacs are unable to handle that amount of hard drive space. It's that they have either ATA/66 buses or ATA/100 buses, each of which support only 137 GB on any single drive (whether they are in a PC or a Mac). If you want to use a hard drive larger than 137 GB, then you would need to buy an ATA/133 or Serial ATA PCI Card. I don't know the maximum size supported by either of those, and I don't even know if Serial ATA is out yet (or what it is exactly, other than really fast ATA).



Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not super tech-savvy.

barto

It's not an ATA issue. It's a ROM issue. Addresses larger than ~130GB need to be readable. Recent PowerBooks support larger than 137GB, and they don't have ATA-100.



Barto

masker

I have a 200Gb drive in my MDD 867.



Due to the 1000 - 1024 bytes thing , it format s to 186 GB.



I paid $200 USD for it on black friday.



MSKR

microtrash

People often make this kind of mistake : ATA-133 and support for 137Gb+ HD are not the same. Both features where introduced at the same time, and support for larger drive is a feature of any ATA-133 card/moto, but you can have this feature also on ATA-66 and ATA-100.

shawnpatrickjoyce

So do the PowerBook 667 DVI machines support hard drive sizes in excess of that limit?

paul

i'm 99% sure that over f/w there is no such limit

luki

A specific question to Masker.



Did you simply hook up the 200GB drive as a slave drive in addition to the normal boot drive? Or, did you need to install a different UttraATA 100 controller card? It sounds like you just inserted the drive and it worked, but I want to be sure I understand correctly.



Thanks to everyone for their responses to this query.



BTW, MicroCenter had a special this week on the Western Digital 200GB drive at $200 after rebates. It is a 7200RPM Ultra ATA/100 drive with an 8MB cache. Box includes an ATA/100 controller, which would enable PC's to get over the 137GB barrier. Funny thing is, they have a little sticker over the Mac symbol on the outside, and the installation manual infers that the drive should not be used on Macs because of the 137 barrier.



Whatever, at $1/GB for a big drive, I think this is a reasonable value.



They also had the Cendyne 4X DVD-RW (really a Pioneer DVR-105, fully supported) for $200 after rebates. Sorry if such comments don't belong in this thread.

masker

The 911 chipset supports a very large hard drive size.



Something ridiculous actually.



I forget exactly but it's deveral times bigger tahn any available drive current.



i guess if you had a firewire RAID system with 250GB drives in it you would "see" a 372GB volume.



MSKR

eugene

Most legacy ATA controllers have a 28-bit address space. Newer controllers (doesn't really matter what type of ATA they are) should support 48-bit addressing. Some support slightly less, but shold still be plenty for a long time to come.

pyr3

All of IDE is really a hack. They've been adding and adding to the hack to get it to run with larger drives ever since they started hitting the limit. It used to be controller and addressed by the BIOS, but they had to take it off the BIOS and now the OS and chipset control most of it. They really need to develop some solution that is better than creating a new chipset every year or so because they reached the limit. SCSI to my knowledge doesn't have this problem, but I don't use it so I don't know the intimate details.

defiant

SerialATA ?