My experience is that the limit isn't on the size of one of the partitions, but on the total size of the drive, and is determined by the number of bits allocated to (buffer size for) LBA (logical block addressing) by the firmware in the hard drive interface. In the case of external hard drives connected by USB or Firewire, that LBA limit is in the external drive hardware and can be greater than the limit of the motherboard drive interface(s). Any new USB/Firewire external drive interface is LBA 48-bit which is some huge number of terabytes or larger. In the case of SATA / e-SATA, the interface for the external drive is on the motherboard or on a PCI (or other) interface expansion card, and the maximum size is thereby determined.
Yes, you can use a large hard drive in an external USB/Firewire case/interface on your old machine. Even USB-1. Fred Holmes At 06:34 PM 5/8/2009, rleesimon wrote: >My motherboard has a 120gb limit for the internal ide drive (old dell 4400) >..does that also go for an external USB2 drive or does that obey some other >standard? If I get a 1tb external usb2 drive, will I hafta divide it into 9 >different drives (hassle) or can I keep 1 drive letter? > > > >Main Circuit Board 2.00 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4 > >8 kilobyte primary memory cache > >512 kilobyte secondary memory cache > >Board: Intel Corporation D845PT AAA67834-304 > >Bus Clock: 100 megahertz > >BIOS: Intel Corp. A06 06/12/2002 > >Intel site does not say bios update needed. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
