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Apple IDE Cannot Access Beyond 137GB

Posted by pudge on from the hard-drives-for-dummies dept.

An anonymous reader writes: "iMacLinux reported on a PenguinPPC story about Apple hardware being unable to address more than 137GB of space on IDE drives. The Apple computers only have ATA-66, which can only address 28 bits, while ATA-100/133 can address 48 bits. Solutions include using a PCI controller, FireWire or SCSI."

2 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Kings to Paupers by dtype · · Score: 3, Informative
    You're somewhat right.

    (1) The ATA/100 would still gain you the larger address space, allowing larger capacities. Since
    160GB drives are here (and a scant us$250 to boot), this is quite important.

    (2) I agree that the faster bus in theory won't get you more performance with a _single_ drive. But the fact is, that benchmarks say otherwise. For whatever reason, the faster burst speed of the bus has slightly improved the overall speed. I'm not a particularly good hardware engineer, but when I run `hdparm` on a couple of drives, I like the faster speed regardless of reason... (I still hate IDE and would much prefer SCSI, but I can't get a 160GB SCSI drive for $250.)

    (3) ATA/100 controllers are dirt cheap. I can't believe that the extra few bucks wouldn't be worth it in marketing value alone.

    --

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    Drew Streib, dtype.org

  2. Re:Firewire? by achbed · · Score: 3, Informative

    Is there such a thing as a 'native firewire' drive?
    Can having an ATA controller in a firewire case make it possible to get around the motherboard limitations?

    1) Yes, it is possible to have a "native" firewire drive. However, since nobody but apple has an internal firewire port, no drive manufacturer is going to make one. They'll stick with bridge chipsets and cheap IDE disks.
    2) Yes, a FireWire bridge is the second best method to get around chipset limitations. The best is to use a PCI expansion card, as the PCI bus is (currently) faster than FireWire in terms of transfer speeds.