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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
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Monday, December 2, 2002
20:44 - Unlimitations
http://www.capitalistlion.com/article.cgi?184

(top) link
Sometimes it's just nice to be using a platform where they did it right the first time.

So, I shopped around, and picked up FireWire Direct's 200GB SlimLine Ultra III model. They offer up to a 320GB solution, but 200 is more than enough to capture all the audio and video I'd ever need in a remote situation. So, I decided on that one.

Plugged it in, formatted, and presto. 200GB volume on my desktop. Boy, I love Macs.

I wondered how today's operating systems would get around the latest in the long string of internal mathematical limitations in the ATA/IDE standard. First it was LBA, "Logical Block Addressing", to get past the 528MB limit (16 heads x 1024 cylinders x 63 sectors/track x 512 bytes/sector) by mapping physically impractical "virtual" dimensions onto usable internal ones (such as pretending the disk had up to 255 heads); then it was Extended Int13 Modes to push past the 8.4GB limit (the same formula with 255 virtual heads, the ATA maximum). Various BIOS and OS implementations handled these solutions differently; some solutions were buggy, some were incomplete, and few were reliable. Today's equivalent of these monuments to early-day buffer-size miserliness is the 137GB limit imposed by the ATA standard maximum 65536 cylinders.

(Here's some reference on the subject.)

ATA-6 is the new-ish standard that dictates hardware that can support disks larger than that size, and newer FireWire devices-- like the bridge used in CapLion's disk-- can address all 200GB (and more, for larger models). And OS X can handle large 48-bit-addressed disks natively, as could OS 9.

I'm distressed to hear that Windows, including XP, hasn't really addressed this yet.

"Current Windows operating systems (98, NT, ME, 2000, XP) do not have native support for hard drives larger than 137 GB. Western Digital has included a conroller card and drivers to address this operating system limitation. During installation, hard drives larger than 137 GB must be attached to the controller card and the drivers for your operating system must be loaded properly to avoid the risk of data loss."

. . .

Update: Ryu Connor, one of the gurus at Tech Report, says:

You need an external enclosure whose controller understands more than 137GB of space. That is where the limitation lies, not with the operating system itself.

Update 20021202: Ryu writes again to tell me that as far as he can tell such an enclosure isn't yet available. Oh well...

No, not for USB2, anyway. (And Windows does need to be Registry-hacked in order to support large disks out of the box-- provided you have a 48-bit LBA BIOS.)

Seriously, I'm not feeling any schadenfreude about this. It sucks. I hope someone figures out a solution for the PC side before long, because what with video-editing and DVD-ripping (--er, creating) and the like, 137GB isn't going to remain a tenable ceiling for much longer. The server implications alone are worrisome. I don't want to find out my e-mail or my digital photo prints were lost because someone was running a Windows server that couldn't address the whole 320GB disk someone chunked into it.

I will say, however, that it's nice to have 200GB disks that run off bus power, without an AC adapter. Almost as nice as not having to worry about any of this stuff in the first place.

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© Brian Tiemann