Squeezing 160G on to ATA Motherboards

MadCow-ard asks: "With the introduction of the new 160 GB hard drives there comes a problem: they only appear to work with the ATA/ATAPI-6, 48 bit-standard. This means not installing them into systems that I have already built with the de facto 28 bit ATA controllers. I build video editing systems that easily reach 800 Mb, and so the Promise solution with a 2 hard drive ATA controller card doesn't really help. Is there a way squeeze these onto my systems without dropping everything above 137.4 Gb?" 160 gigs on a single HD! How soon before terabyte drives become a reality?

Comments

right tool for the job

[mattdm]

Sounds like for the systems you're building, SCSI would be a better choice. Not only will you avoid the sort of problems you're describing, but performance will be far better, especially since you're connecting multiple drives.

Is it time to put IDE on the ash heap of history?

[unitron]

Isn't IDE being kept alive by a bunch of tricks designed to get around built-in limitations that were the result of IDE being come up with back when all sorts of digital space was at a much greater premium? Without some scheme to lie to half of your hardware you can't have more than 4 primary partitions per drive no matter what size it is (or 3 primary and only 1 extended), and only 4 IDE devices per machine. (I know you can install an extra controller card for a couple more IDE channels, but who has that many IRQs to spare?)

SCSI offers more devices but can it do more primary partitions per drive?

Maybe it's time to replace the whole ISA-PCI-IDE started out as an 8-bit platform and got patched and kludged time and time again mess with something that anticipates that what now seem like big drives, big RAM sticks, and fast processors and video cards will soon be classed with 8088s and 64K ram chips. And maybe there's something better than x86, or could be.

And while I'm ranting, how about we *don't* go through another episode of incompatible form factors for motherboards, cases, and power supplies (not to mention memory) that make brand name boxes un-upgradeable except by pitching them into the landfill and buying a whole new system.