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jgrn307 · Mar 12, 2003, 02:33 AM

Ok, so I understand that currently I can't use > 128 GB ATA drives (I wish Maxtor had advertised that before I bought the drive), but am I to understand that, under MacOS 9, Intech's Speedtools was able to get around this limitation through the driver (e.g. software)? Doesn't this suggest that I shouldn't need a new PCI ATA/133 card, rather that Apple should get their act together and upgrade the drivers/whatever needs doing? Or am I totally off and this is purely a hardware limitation? Anyone having this problem should give feedback to Apple!

Here's the Speedtools info:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/archives/...02.html#S13576

The Apple link is, incidentally:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.h...us%7C166261074

Coxy · Mar 12, 2003, 08:07 AM

The limit on the larger hard drives is purely hardware. After all, the new Power Macs and Xserves sport 160 GB HDDs, IIRC.

An ATA133 PCI card with OS X drivers should work fine.

JB72 · Mar 12, 2003, 01:28 PM

Originally posted by Coxy:
The limit on the larger hard drives is purely hardware. After all, the new Power Macs and Xserves sport 160 GB HDDs, IIRC.

That's good to know. I plan on getting a pair of the Seagate 7200.7 160MBs in the future.

voodoosand · Mar 12, 2003, 03:11 PM

Oh man, I have struggled with this one - so, anything larger than 137 (or 138 - I can't remember) GB will NOT be seen on your hard drive if you have a stock set up in almost every mac (I am just guessing that the XServe or something is an exception). I bought a 180 drive from Western Digital, bought a mac version of an ata/100 PCI card that let me see the whole thing. Problem was (it was the sonnet card) - I couldn't install any system on the drive with the card (I wanted it to be my main drive), so it was useless. An oddity that you might notice is that at times the system will "see" all of the space if you have had an ATA card installed (I thought I could return it, because all of a sudden OS X.2 was seeing the whole drive even without the ATA card)So I returned it, and lo and behold, the drive gets mucked up (I would guess because of the conflict in deciding how much space there really was on the drive) and now I am back to using a 180 GB drive that only has 137 GB useable on it. Bleck - this is such a hassle - my advice after all this? Buy a ATA card that should let you use the larger drives - even though my set up didn't work, it is supposed to and others have had success with this.

jgrn307 · Mar 12, 2003, 03:50 PM

I had planned on making it an external firewire drive (but it was cheaper to buy an IDE + a firewire enclosure than a prefab FW), and now I'm glad I did. The enclosure was cheaper than the ATA/133 card, and I get the ability to tote it around with me. I don't have the 128gb limitation on the drive like I did using it as an internal drive...

Now, let's see if I can get this sucker cross-platform too!

Terri · Mar 12, 2003, 03:52 PM

I thought that this was only a problem on machines older then the AGP G4s and maybe some of the older iMacs.

jgrn307 · Mar 12, 2003, 04:17 PM

Anything pre-mirrored door G4s and Xserve (essentially, all of them) has that 128GB limit, but it is something Apple COULD fix via software.