At 09:23 PM 12/11/01 -0500, Ted Mozer wrote the following: >In preparation for the Turtle Beach AudioTron that will be my Christmas >present (sits with the audio stuff, hooks to the home network, finds all the >audio files on any computers on the network and allows you to select and play >them through your home audio system), I would like to take one of my old >computers sitting in the garage (486's/maybe a Pentium), throw the largest >hard drive I can afford in it, and hang it on the network as a file server, >mainly for ripping my CD collection to it. > >My question is, with an older CPU/Bios running Windows 98 SE, how large of a >hard drive can I expect to use as a single physical drive/single partition?? >I will like to install at least a 60 gig.
Depending upon the date of the PC and CMOS, if you have an EIDE controller then you will have a controller that supports LBA (Logical Block Addressing) to access drives in excess of 504MB. If not, then you are stuck with 486 systems that can only have 500MB drives (like me!). Boot the system and check the CMOS setup for disk drives. If it allows LBA, then you probably have an EIDE controller so you can use a large drive. If not, you may also try a Promise EIDE controller card. The old 2300 (circa 1995) was a good choice. See http://www.promise.com/ for more details and newer models. CPU/BIOS doesn't control partition size, only drive size. Partition size is controlled by OS. DOS v2.1 and lower -- 15MB partitions, FAT16 DOS 3.0-3.3 -- 32MB partitions, FAT16 DOS 4.0 and above -- 2GB partitions, FAT 16 Win 95 (OSR2) and up --100GB partitions and up, FAT32 >Also, since the AudioTron only runs at 10 mbps on the network, should I worry >about CPU or drive speed? I would think that a 5400 rpm drive on a standard >IDE bus (not Ultra) should not be a problem..... CPU speed is far far greater than disk access speed ever will be. Roughly speaking, a CPU is at least a 1000 times faster than disk access. First IBM PC had a CPU speed of 4.78MHz (about 5 million times per second). Compare this with a disk read/write times in the range 10-30 ms (milliseconds or thousandth's of a second) and you can see that even this old machine is some 500 times faster than disk access. Disk access speeds have nothing to do with CPU speed. Speed of data retrieval on a disk drive is controlled by 3 things: Rotational speed (RPM) - the RPM of the drive Seek time (MS--milliseconds) -- the time a read/write head takes to reach a specified track and sector Data transfer rate (DTR - mbytes/sec) -- the time it takes to read/write a specified number of megabytes The term latency is applied to these 3 factors in that the disk read/write head must start up, cross a number of tracks, switch to read/write mode on a specific track, and rotate to the specific sector on a track to begin the read/write operation. The most important of the 3 factors is really the DTR. If you look at specifications for various drives you will see varying seek times, data access rates, latency, and rotational speeds. Example: 40GB Western Digital Caviar Drive (http://www.wdc.com/products/products.asp?DriveID=9) Rotational speed 7200 RPM Read seek time 8.9ms Write seek time 10.9 ms Track-to-track seek time 2.0 ms Average latency 4.2 ms Depending upon mode, DTR is 16.6 to 100MB/s So 4 different PCs with this exact same drive could have far different results depending upon the drive controller installed in the PC. The DTR rates could be 16MB/s, 33.3 MB/s, 66.6MB/s or 100.0 MB/s Most people who purchase disk drives never look at seek times, latency or transfer rates. -- Gerry Boyd ============= PCWorks Mailing List ================= Don't see your post? Check our posting guidelines & make sure you've followed proper posting procedures, http://pcworkers.com/rules.htm Contact list owner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Unsubscribing and other changes: http://pcworkers.com =====================================================
