137Gb . . .

We got this note from “Hobo Bob,” which brings up an issue most of you are probably not aware of which
might bite some of you on the bottom one of these days.

I recently purchased a pair of 160 Gig Maxtors to add to my system due to
the total lack of space I have left on the current 80s and the 75 I
have.

One little problem my HPT370 controller doesn’t see anymore then
137 gigs of each drive. In the end, I lost a total of 65 gigs and can’t live
with that so I have yet to format them. I quickly went in search of
solutions to this problem.

It turns out to be a new ATAPI/IDE standard for 48 bit registers to allow for bigger drives.
So I went to see if Abit had an update for my KT7A-RAID board for this. Nope, they have sent out the same
1.11xxxx HPT370 bios for the last five BIOS updates.

I then turned to Highpoint for a solution. It appears they do have BIOS updates to fix this issue (along
with BIOS updates up to 2.31 even). After doing some
looking around on Abit’s site I stumbled on the KG7-RAID board which
happens to have a brand new BIOS update that fixes this little issue with
the HPT370, the same controller I have.

So I know what I ask for is not impossible, but I have yet to see any action from either of the two
companies to fix this problem with the KT7A-RAID board.

I was hoping maybe you could write a little article about the fact companies are selling this
big hard drives, but warn people that companies are slow to support them.

Why should we? He already has. 🙂

To answer Hobo Bob’s immediate question, from the looks of this, it looks like Abit may have just addressed Hobo Bob’s problem for the regular hard drive controllers. The website just linked also has modified BIOSes with the latest Highpoint controllers grafted on.

For everybody else, it’s an issue you should be aware of. You can read a bit more about this here.

You may think, “I’ll never buy a 137Gb+ hard drive,” and you’re probably wrong. By this time next year, the odds are your medium-end $100-$130 hard drive is going to be more than 137Gb.

Just something else to keep in the back of your head and look for before buying.

Email Ed