Hard Drive capacities-Cheap IDE real estate

Hard disk drives continue to push capacities, many people find themselves wanting to take advantage of the low cost of storage real estate. There as some issues that can arise when purchasing the newest large hard drives, and placing them in an existing system that may be more than a couple years old. If you have been building, repairing, or upgrading PC's formore than a couple years you will remember limitations on HDD's (hard disk drives) size by the BIOS. This limitation increased over time, and allowed for , what at the time seemed HUGE disks I.e. 1gb-4gb. If the motherboard in your system did not have a BIOS upgrade to allow the recognition of these drives you had one other choice; use software to allow the drive to be interpreted via dynamic overlay. This did allow a large drive to be used in a system that could not recognize the geometry of the drive, but left much to be desired in terms of performance from the drive. Having software loaded to allow the HDD to be interpreted made for loss of some performance.

With the increase in HDD capacities of late this issue has caused some problems as well. It is always a good idea to check with your systems/motherboards manufacturer to ascertain the largest HDD capacity that can be used. I.e. ECS's CPU/HDD K7 series compatibility list. Using this list as an example, note that even though all the boards are Socket A, there are some models only supporting up to a 40gb capacity drive. So in the case of a K7AMA, K7VZM and some other ECS boards, if you placed a 80gb HDD in the system, you are going to have problems. Assuming the drive is jumpered correctly, ribbons attached correctly etc. an 80gb drive will not be recognized correctly. At present if your motherboard is limited to capacities that you wish to exceed, you can either purchase a new motherboard, purchase a IDE HDD controller or RAID card, or use Dynamic Overlay software if there is no BIOS update to allow for the capacity of the HDD you want to use.

There are some other things to keep in mind with large capacity hard drives as well. At least if you are using Win9x. Microsoft's Windows 95(a/b/c), 98(se) and ME come with DOS utilities to partition and format a new hard disk drive. MS has released a newer version of FDISK that will properly partition dives that are 64+gb, which you can Download here.

There are many other issues regarding partitioning of your HDD. Answering yes or OK can very likely mean loss of all data! there are 3rd party utilities available that allow manipulation of hard drive partitions and copying of data with out loss (unless you chose to erase), and most hard drive manufacturers make their disk copying software available online I.e. Western Digitals Download Library. This software will allow you to copy your existing data to the new (larger) drive among other tests and such..

This is of course not a definitive guide, and is only meant to give you an idea of some problems that our Tech support dep. have been asked about. Hard disk drive manufacturers and motherboard makers will have all the specifications and details. I placed the manufacturers links above only to demonstrate what information is available, and by no means to indicate that only ECS motherboards have these limits, or that only Western Digital provide software utilities. if you own a name brand PC such as Dell, Gateway or Compaq/HP please check with your systems manufacturer.

The current cost per gb with HDD's is a very affordable upgrade with IDE drives. The low cost that attracts many to purchase, can lead to hours of frustration if not researched thoroughly. the advantage of having a 60+gb HDD can easily be diminished if all your data is lost in transferring, or the new drive is not supported thus not recognized.