[kndonlee]

Hi All,

I was wondering if anyone would be able to help me decipher this little quirk of mine. It may be totally normal, but just to double chack and make sure it's a normal thing....

I need tons of storage for a variety of things, and went for the gusto and got myself a 160Gig harddrive. however, when I popped it into my firewire case and loaded it up, I got to format it to 127.97 gigs. Now that doesn't seem right at all.

I know there is a difference between the formatted capacity and rated capacity, however, there shoudl've be such a disparity. Because, the rated capacity calculates a megabyte at 1,000,000 bytes, whereas the formated cpacity calculates one megabyte at 2^20=1048576 bytes, 160,000,000,000/1048576 gives me approx 152 gigs... that's a big difference from 127 gigs....I could spare a gig or two...but not 25 gigs!!!! =P

Anyone with a 160gig get the same thing? Or am I being limited by Mac OS and can't format above a certan capacity and have certain size drives?

Thanx All

[istallion]

The problem is that your IDE controller can't address more than 128GB(28bits & 512B blocks).
Maxtor developed the ata133 spec which allows 131PB size drives. Although I'm not sure there are any firewire/IDE bridges that support it yet.

[rjenkinson]

Originally posted by istallion:
<STRONG>The problem is that your IDE controller can't address more than 128GB(28bits & 512B blocks).
Maxtor developed the ata133 spec which allows 131PB size drives. Although I'm not sure there are any firewire/IDE bridges that support it yet.</STRONG>

there is an acard controller which supports the full 160 GB. you can read about it on this xlr8yourmac page.

-r.

[kndonlee]

hehe..I knew it was something like that...there was a limit...Thanx guys. =)

Donald

[l008com]

All the more reason for me to go SCSI $ $