Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

I have 3 IDE hard drives on my Mac G4 right now, instead of adding
another (more heat), I was thinking of just replacing one with the
largest drive I can get. What's the largest drive that I can safely
install under OSX (10.3.3). Does the Mac OS have the same limitations as
windows does (250 gig)?

Thanks
-Richard

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

Does Windows have a 250G limit? I have 500Gig arrays on Windows machines..
But they are 2 drive arrays with a hardware controller. Same on the mac.
"Richard Ragon" <bsema04NOSPAM@hanaho.com> wrote in message
news:qZZac.12189366$Of.2034479@news.easynews.com...
> I have 3 IDE hard drives on my Mac G4 right now, instead of adding
> another (more heat), I was thinking of just replacing one with the
> largest drive I can get. What's the largest drive that I can safely
> install under OSX (10.3.3). Does the Mac OS have the same limitations as
> windows does (250 gig)?
>
> Thanks
> -Richard
>

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

Richard Ragon wrote:
> I have 3 IDE hard drives on my Mac G4 right now, instead of adding
> another (more heat), I was thinking of just replacing one with the
> largest drive I can get. What's the largest drive that I can safely
> install under OSX (10.3.3). Does the Mac OS have the same limitations as
> windows does (250 gig)?

As suggested by another, there is no such limitation in Windows. That
limitation would be imposed by the system BIOS or controller firmware, not
the OS.

To answer your question, I've seen a pair of 400 Gb Hitachi drives installed
on a G5 with OSX this week. The drives are samples sent to the company I
work for, but I am guessing that they are a fair representation of the final
product. The tech who installed them didn't mention any problems.

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

400 Gig drives eh?

cool.



"i'm_tired" <it_isnt_valid@emailaddy.edu> wrote in message
news:N31bc.52627$gA5.672991@attbi_s03...
> Richard Ragon wrote:
> > I have 3 IDE hard drives on my Mac G4 right now, instead of adding
> > another (more heat), I was thinking of just replacing one with the
> > largest drive I can get. What's the largest drive that I can safely
> > install under OSX (10.3.3). Does the Mac OS have the same limitations as
> > windows does (250 gig)?
>
> As suggested by another, there is no such limitation in Windows. That
> limitation would be imposed by the system BIOS or controller firmware, not
> the OS.
>
> To answer your question, I've seen a pair of 400 Gb Hitachi drives
installed
> on a G5 with OSX this week. The drives are samples sent to the company I
> work for, but I am guessing that they are a fair representation of the
final
> product. The tech who installed them didn't mention any problems.
>
>

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

Richard Ragon wrote:

> I have 3 IDE hard drives on my Mac G4 right now, instead of adding
> another (more heat), I was thinking of just replacing one with the
> largest drive I can get. What's the largest drive that I can safely
> install under OSX (10.3.3). Does the Mac OS have the same limitations as
> windows does (250 gig)?
>

I would keep one IDE drive and get an external firewire.
You want big?....LaCie makes a 1 terabyte hard drive
(Macworld 2004 Best of Show)

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

nappy wrote:

> Does Windows have a 250G limit? I have 500Gig arrays on Windows machines..

Oops.. it's even less than that..

According to numerous sites this is a known problem for any Hard Drives
over 137 gig and Windows limitations.

"Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows 98 SE, Windows 98, and
Windows NT 4.0 do not provide native support for hard drives that are
larger than 137GB." -- Quote from Intel's own website here:

http://support.intel.com/support/c [...] 009299.htm

So, yes.. My original question still stands, does OSX have this same
problem?

-Richard



> But they are 2 drive arrays with a hardware controller. Same on the mac.
> "Richard Ragon" <bsema04NOSPAM@hanaho.com> wrote in message
> news:qZZac.12189366$Of.2034479@news.easynews.com...
>
>>I have 3 IDE hard drives on my Mac G4 right now, instead of adding
>>another (more heat), I was thinking of just replacing one with the
>>largest drive I can get. What's the largest drive that I can safely
>>install under OSX (10.3.3). Does the Mac OS have the same limitations as
>>windows does (250 gig)?
>>
>>Thanks
>>-Richard
>>
>
>
>

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

i'm_tired wrote:

> Richard Ragon wrote:
>
>>I have 3 IDE hard drives on my Mac G4 right now, instead of adding
>>another (more heat), I was thinking of just replacing one with the
>>largest drive I can get. What's the largest drive that I can safely
>>install under OSX (10.3.3). Does the Mac OS have the same limitations as
>>windows does (250 gig)?
>
>
> As suggested by another, there is no such limitation in Windows. That
> limitation would be imposed by the system BIOS or controller firmware, not
> the OS.

So, Intel corporation is telling us a lie?

> To answer your question, I've seen a pair of 400 Gb Hitachi drives installed
> on a G5 with OSX this week. The drives are samples sent to the company I
> work for, but I am guessing that they are a fair representation of the final
> product. The tech who installed them didn't mention any problems.

I only install IBM/Hitachi drives, so I'll take this as good news here.

-Richard

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

Nihil wrote:

>
>
> Richard Ragon wrote:
>
>> I have 3 IDE hard drives on my Mac G4 right now, instead of adding
>> another (more heat), I was thinking of just replacing one with the
>> largest drive I can get. What's the largest drive that I can safely
>> install under OSX (10.3.3). Does the Mac OS have the same limitations
>> as windows does (250 gig)?
>>
>
> I would keep one IDE drive and get an external firewire.
> You want big?....LaCie makes a 1 terabyte hard drive
> (Macworld 2004 Best of Show)

The only benefit I can see in working with external firewire drives is
portability. Beyond that??

By adding in Firewire drives I would be complicating my editors with
more potential to go wrong, and subject myself open to more possible
problems by opening myself up to firewire driver issues, bandwidth
limitations, additional cost, additional firewire ports, and even power
issues.

Add this all in with the knowledge that Apple has not certified a single
Firewire drive yet... makes me think that the downfalls far outweigh the
good points.. your mileage may very.

But, Thanks.
-Richard

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

"Richard Ragon" <bsema04NOSPAM@hanaho.com> wrote in message
news:ic8bc.12226772$Of.2041122@news.easynews.com...
> nappy wrote:
>
> > Does Windows have a 250G limit? I have 500Gig arrays on Windows
machines..
>
> Oops.. it's even less than that..
>
> According to numerous sites this is a known problem for any Hard Drives
> over 137 gig and Windows limitations.
>
> "Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows 98 SE, Windows 98, and
> Windows NT 4.0 do not provide native support for hard drives that are
> larger than 137GB." -- Quote from Intel's own website here:
>
> http://support.intel.com/support/c [...] 009299.htm
>

I think that is from 1999. And as far as I knew it was a Bios limitation. I
don't think it exists anymore as I have more than 137G on more than a few
machines.






> So, yes.. My original question still stands, does OSX have this same
> problem?
>
> -Richard
>
>
>
> > But they are 2 drive arrays with a hardware controller. Same on the
mac.
> > "Richard Ragon" <bsema04NOSPAM@hanaho.com> wrote in message
> > news:qZZac.12189366$Of.2034479@news.easynews.com...
> >
> >>I have 3 IDE hard drives on my Mac G4 right now, instead of adding
> >>another (more heat), I was thinking of just replacing one with the
> >>largest drive I can get. What's the largest drive that I can safely
> >>install under OSX (10.3.3). Does the Mac OS have the same limitations as
> >>windows does (250 gig)?
> >>
> >>Thanks
> >>-Richard
> >>
> >
> >
> >
>

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

On Fri, 02 Apr 2004 07:00:30 GMT Richard Ragon
<bsema04NOSPAM@hanaho.com> wrote in Message id:
<ic8bc.12226772$Of.2041122@news.easynews.com>:

>nappy wrote:
>
>> Does Windows have a 250G limit? I have 500Gig arrays on Windows machines..
>
>Oops.. it's even less than that..
>
>According to numerous sites this is a known problem for any Hard Drives
>over 137 gig and Windows limitations.
>
>"Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows 98 SE, Windows 98, and
>Windows NT 4.0 do not provide native support for hard drives that are
>larger than 137GB." -- Quote from Intel's own website here:
>
>http://support.intel.com/support/chipsets/iaa/sb/CS-009299.htm

If you keep reading the above link...

"48-bit LBA support can be added with Windows XP Service Pack 1 †and
Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 †. Please contact Microsoft* for additional
information. In order to enable hard drives larger than 137GB, you will
need to install the Intel Application Accelerator or install a 3rd party
48-bit LBA controller card."

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

Richard Ragon wrote:
> i'm_tired wrote:
>
>> Richard Ragon wrote:
>>
>>> I have 3 IDE hard drives on my Mac G4 right now, instead of adding
>>> another (more heat), I was thinking of just replacing one with the
>>> largest drive I can get. What's the largest drive that I can safely
>>> install under OSX (10.3.3). Does the Mac OS have the same limitations as
>>> windows does (250 gig)?
>>
>>
>> As suggested by another, there is no such limitation in Windows. That
>> limitation would be imposed by the system BIOS or controller firmware,
not
>> the OS.
>
> So, Intel corporation is telling us a lie?

Well, it was an innacurracy, not exactly a lie (and it is old information).
All of the major hard drive manufacturers supply a windows tool to enable
disk support above 137 Gb. Service pack 2 for windows 2000 also had a
little fix for the same built in. But, nobody really tells the whole story.
If you really want to hear it, I'll try to keep it brief.

Windows 98/ME don't really support NTFS although there are a couple of tools
to force them to recognize NTFS... let's set that issue aside and just
concentrate on W2K and WXP. The NT kernal didn't support drives above 137
Gb due to an issue translating bus mastering controlled by the system BIOS.
Controller cards made by Promise and others (due to having programmers who
created firmware while already aware of this issue) never exhibited this
problem. So, if you put a 200 Gb drive on a promise card in your Windows
box, you'd never have a problem... whereas if you put the same drive on the
system board IDE controller, you would probably lose all of your data when
you filled the drive to 136 Gb. You wouldn't even make it to 137 before it
failed. Service pack 2 for W2K had a patch for this, but there were still
sytem BIOS's that couldn't support drives over 136 Gb. - That's really how
it was determined that it wasn't completely a windows problem.

WXP was released already fixed. However, if you have a system board like
(just as an example) an Intel 810, 815 etc or perhaps an FIC AD11, you still
couldn't have drives that large without a BIOS update. Intel took their
sweet time releasing a BIOS update for the 810 and 815... and I keep hearing
that update caused more problems than it was worth (those boards are limited
to a maximum of a 1Ghz Socket 370 PIII anyway, so it never really affected
me). - So, it really isn't a windows limitation. It is a translation
problem between the System BIOS and the Kernal.

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

<posted & mailed>

Note that Windows has no 250G limitation, per se. Limits on the IDE disk
size have been based on the IDE controller chipset (the original ATAPI spec
set a hard limit of 8.4G that initial implementor's stuck to), or the BIOS.
When vendors started shipping >8.4G drives, they had to implement a work
around. That work-around the ATAPI spec was LBA and BIOS vendors started
shipping 32-bit LBA in the BIOS (which mapped the actual drive geometry to
something the BIOS and ATAPI controller could grok). As drives got bigger,
it came clear that a 48-bit LBA standard was needed (without, there was a
limit of 140G or so), or at the very least a 48-bit LBA overlay to the BIOS
that could be loaded after the fact. I think some Intel chipsets also
imposed arbitrary disk size limits for no good reason. Users of operating
systems that don't use the BIOS (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) didn't notice the
limits, but Windows users were affected as were users of hardware disk
arrays and add-on cards. Regardless, nothing in Windows itself limited the
user to 250G or smaller disks. Today, the PC BIOSes universally support
48-bit LBA mode and can accomodate any currently available disk.

The Mac G4 with current OS/X should have no such limitation.

The biggest single drive you can purchase now (that I know of) is a 400G
Hitachi. There are several models in the 250G - 300G range from various
manufacturers that should be considered too. Keep in mind that the larger
data density drives are generally less reliable than smaller drives and
certainly perfom far worse than arrays of smaller drives.

LaCie makes a reasonably-priced external firewire 1 terabyte drive (actually
a shoe-box sized RAID array). It has various advantages over the internal
drives: more reliable than the largest IDE drives, better performance, and
portable.

Someone mentioned this before, but you panned it saying that it would
"complicate your editors" with "more potential to go wrong" and open
yourself to "firewire driver issues", "bandwidth limitations", etc. But I
don't know where those concerns come from. The bandwidth is greater than
the internal IDE support, and from an application standpoint the drive is
no different than any other. The drivers are rock-solid (Apple, of course,
being the creator of FireWire), the cost is only slightly higher than an
internal model, and the power consumption is comparatively low. I wouldn't
worry too much about Apple not "certifying" any firewire drive since they
simply don't certify simple disk storage devices and I don't know that they
intend to.

Personally, I use external firewire drives under Linux and Mac OS/X all the
time and the performance is generally better than the internal drives and
there have never been any issues with drivers with any model of drive (I
have not tried LaCie's, I'm using various off-name brands) under either
Linux or Mac OS/X. In both cases, every drive I've used is simple
plug-and-play.


Richard Ragon wrote:

> I have 3 IDE hard drives on my Mac G4 right now, instead of adding
> another (more heat), I was thinking of just replacing one with the
> largest drive I can get. What's the largest drive that I can safely
> install under OSX (10.3.3). Does the Mac OS have the same limitations as
> windows does (250 gig)?
>
> Thanks
> -Richard

--
remove .spam from address to reply by e-mail.

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

On Fri, 02 Apr 2004 19:57:54 GMT, James McIninch
<james.mcininch@comcast.net.spam> wrote:

>operating systems that don't use the BIOS (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.)

Do you know the reason behind this? The BIOS providess hardware
specific routines under a standard interface. Those "drivers" are
tailored to their hardware. Why would an OS attempt their (generic?)
own? For the sake of speed? That shouldn't be a issue, when BIOS can
be copied to RAM. What am I missing?

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

In article <gsqs609eocuajvpkogk8akisjr97msfffn@4ax.com>,
Bariloche <bariloche@bariloche.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 02 Apr 2004 19:57:54 GMT, James McIninch
> <james.mcininch@comcast.net.spam> wrote:
>
> >operating systems that don't use the BIOS (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.)
>
> Do you know the reason behind this? The BIOS providess hardware
> specific routines under a standard interface. Those "drivers" are
> tailored to their hardware. Why would an OS attempt their (generic?)
> own? For the sake of speed? That shouldn't be a issue, when BIOS can
> be copied to RAM. What am I missing?

Limits that the BIOS places on various resources? For instance, when the
BIOS was limited to 2^29 bytes on a disk (486 era), Linux (2.0 era) wasn't.
Of course, that limit no longer exists, but you get the idea. Drive overlays
were another method of getting around the limit. Also, avoiding the BIOS
avoids any possible bugs in the BIOS. It also replaces lots of different
BIOSes with one source.

--
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? [TOFU := text oben,
A: Top-posting. followup unten]
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet? -- Daniel Jensen

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

On Sat, 03 Apr 2004 19:35:02 GMT, ebenONE@tampabay.ARE-ARE.com.unmunge
(Hactar) wrote:

>Limits that the BIOS places on various resources?

A good reason. But it should have an option to resort to the BIOS when
it fails to drive something by its own code. Does it?

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

In article <9tev609c7jm3993kdmi3sl79vehc0u6nk2@4ax.com>,
Bariloche <bariloche@bariloche.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 03 Apr 2004 19:35:02 GMT, ebenONE@tampabay.ARE-ARE.com.unmunge
> (Hactar) wrote:
>
> >Limits that the BIOS places on various resources?
>
> A good reason. But it should have an option to resort to the BIOS when
> it fails to drive something by its own code. Does it?

IME, Linux never fails to find something that the BIOS can find, and can
find things the BIOS can't.

--
-eben ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm home.tampabay.rr.com/hactar
VIRGO: All Virgos are extremely friendly and intelligent - except
for you. Expect a big surprise today when you wind up with your
head impaled upon a stick. -- Weird Al, _Your Horoscope for Today_

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

On Sun, 04 Apr 2004 17:50:40 GMT, ebenONE@tampabay.ARE-ARE.com.unmunge
(Hactar) wrote:

>IME, Linux never fails to find something that the BIOS can find, and can
>find things the BIOS can't.

Find, yes; but, driving?

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (More info?)

In article <iav1705r22msb14km1qvodr3pmfush7p5a@4ax.com>,
Bariloche <bariloche@bariloche.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 04 Apr 2004 17:50:40 GMT, ebenONE@tampabay.ARE-ARE.com.unmunge
> (Hactar) wrote:
>
> >IME, Linux never fails to find something that the BIOS can find, and can
> >find things the BIOS can't.
>
> Find, yes; but, driving?

I don't think the BIOS can control much more than the hard/floppy/CD drive(s),
the keyboard, and the monitor, and Linux or Solaris have no problem with
those. Other devices are controlled by drivers within the OS.

At least, that's how I _think_ a BIOS works.

--
-eben ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm home.tampabay.rr.com/hactar

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of
being called an idea at all. -Oscar Wilde

Archived from groups: rec.video.desktop (