Could A Pentium II 233mhz Handle A 20gig HDD?

The system also has 192mb of Ram and is running Windows XP(just ). I was told by a guy that a 233mhz wouldnt be able to handle a 20gig Hard Drive. Its going to have a 400mhz fitted soon anyway but i was just wondering whether it would be ok to use the 20gig with the 233mhz until i can get around to modding the slot case on this 400mhz so it can fit on the board.

Yes it will. Who was the guy?

Harddisk size has nothing to do with the processor (at least within reason), you could plug a Pentium 60 into a 250 gig hard disk, or hell you could strap in a RAID card and give it one terabyte of disk space... The real point is, does the motherboard support that size? Usually it was just a bios limitation that could be avoided by an updated bios. Sometimes you had to buy an external IDE controller to get around it.

I do believe there is some sort of UBER limit that a 32-bit processor cannot approach, but if I recall correctly, it's something insane like dozens of terabytes.

Thanks. I didnt think it would matter but this guy who was selling old Pentium stuff at a computer fair i went to the other week swore blind it wouldnt be able to handle more than the 4.1 Gig thats in it or 8 Gig at most! He did also say the motherboard wouldnt be able to handle more than the 233mhz thats in it and it wouldnt be able to accept more than 256mb of Ram and he was wrong about that too...I know for a fact it can take up to 1 Gig of Ram(says so in the manual i downloaded) and the largest processor i've seen in the same board is a 466mhz Celeron.

The BIOS is what limits you in HD size. I just put together an old system (P1-133) for my sister yesterday with a 10GB HD. The BIOS technically only supports 8GB, but with special BIOS overlays I can get up to 128GB. If I had an external controller, I could do even more


The current limit of HD size is restricted by the 48-bit LBA, for a maximum theoretical size of 255TB (if I do my math correctly)

JigPu

Thanks JigPu. This guy made it sound like there was no chance in hell i could add a bigger Hard Drive... I was going to do a Bios upgrade on it anyway, its an old Abit AB-LX6 motherboard.

It is 256TB because 0 is counted as well.

48bit LBA allows for a maximum addressable space of 144 petabytes (144,000,000 gigabytes)

LBA refers to the maximum number of sectors that can be addressed.

Old standard (28 bit)

2^28 = 268,435,456 sectors of 512 bytes

268,435,456 * 512 = 137,438,953,472 bytes (137.4 GB)

New standard (48 bit)

2^48 = 281,474,976,710,656 sectors of 512 bytes

281,474,976,710,656 * 512 = 144,115,188,075,855,872 bytes (144,115,188 GB)