Asus Board with HDD support beyond 128 GB

  • Thread starter Thread starter Christian Schulz
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Christian Schulz

Hello out there,

I've just bought a new 160 Gig drive, but unfortunately I had to realize
that my old board (Socket 7) doesn't support/recognizes it. So I decided
to buy a new second-hand mainboard.

I found the following tab on the german Asus page:

http://www.asuscom.de/support/FAQ/faq076_32gb_ide_hdd.htm

for some older boards there is written down:
= 128GB for/with "current beta"-BIOS
or

= 128GB for/with "current final"-BIOS
Click to expand...

And one page down, you can read:

"Changes of the Beta-BIOSversion won't be published."

Is there someone with an idea of what they mean?

I fear that I buy a board with a "potential" support of biiig drives,
but can't flash it because I can't download the latest Beta-BIOS.

Christian
 
Christian said:
Hello out there,

I've just bought a new 160 Gig drive, but unfortunately I had to realize
that my old board (Socket 7) doesn't support/recognizes it. So I decided
to buy a new second-hand mainboard.

I found the following tab on the german Asus page:

http://www.asuscom.de/support/FAQ/faq076_32gb_ide_hdd.htm

for some older boards there is written down:


And one page down, you can read:

"Changes of the Beta-BIOSversion won't be published."

Is there someone with an idea of what they mean?

I fear that I buy a board with a "potential" support of biiig drives,
but can't flash it because I can't download the latest Beta-BIOS.

Christian
Click to expand...

"Changes of the Beta-BIOSversion won't be published." means that there
won't be a little info link or text file with the beta BIOS downloadable
file that explains what the changes in that file are. It doesn't mean
you can't download and flash the beta BIOS.
 
Christian said:
Hello out there,

I've just bought a new 160 Gig drive, but unfortunately I had to realize
that my old board (Socket 7) doesn't support/recognizes it. So I decided
to buy a new second-hand mainboard.
Click to expand...

Wouldn't it be easier to, say, drop in a Promise Ultra100 TX2?
I found the following tab on the german Asus page:

http://www.asuscom.de/support/FAQ/faq076_32gb_ide_hdd.htm

for some older boards there is written down:


And one page down, you can read:

"Changes of the Beta-BIOSversion won't be published."

Is there someone with an idea of what they mean?
Click to expand...

You get no release notes with the betas, i.e. you mostly have to guess
what the changes were (or read what other people have written).
I fear that I buy a board with a "potential" support of biiig drives,
but can't flash it because I can't download the latest Beta-BIOS.
Click to expand...

<ftp://ftp.asuscom.de/pub/ASUSCOM/BIOS/> usually works.

On a side note, I have no idea whether the CUBX-E would provide support
for 48 bit LBA through the onboard PDC20265 when flashed with the
modified BIOS from <http://members.chello.nl/mgherard/> (Promise BIOS
2.20.0.14 included). On the A7V it works with that chip, assuming
current drivers (Lumberjacker et.al.).

Stephan
 
Stephan said:
Wouldn't it be easier to, say, drop in a Promise Ultra100 TX2?
Click to expand...

Yes ideed, I thought about this solution, too. But: I'm not sure if

1st: this Controller is supported by SUSE Linux 9.1
2nd: I can boot from this 160 Gig Drive (I don't want an
extradrive to boot from)
3rd: I read some postings on GoogleGroups that reported from very
slow transferspeeds (the board I have has only a 33MHz PCI bus ?!)
4th: I'm not (yet?) such a linux-crack to recompile the kernel or
something lake that... .

Christian
 
Furthermore: Is there somebody who can imagine, if there will be >=128
GB Support-BIOS for the

ASUS A7V333

On the page this Board isn't listed as an unsupported, but as supported
Board. But with a current maximum of <128 GB. Will there be an update
for >=128GB?

Christian
 
oh thnxx, nice link!

So with 48Bit I'm able to adress (only) up to 137 GB?

Is there a magic barrier at 128GB AND at 137GB?

And just one more question: It doesn't matter which Revision my board is?

Christian
 
You won't believe, 128GB and 137GB refers to one and the
same thing!

If you take the conventional, conservative, scientific and
traditional binary computer approach, 128GigaBytes is:
128*2^30 = 128*1024*1024*1024 = 137,438,953,472 bytes

If you take the aggressive, marketing and human (western
decimal culture) friendly approach, 137GB is:
137,000,000,000 bytes

So, someone will say, before the LBA48, there is a hard disk
size limit of 128GB, and some others will say, the limit is
137GB actually.

Well, I'm more with the 128GB school, at least I can
comprehend readily, 128 sounds like a binary limit with
fixed number of bits. But I can't tell how the 137GB
relates to a binary system!

My 2 cents.

Stephen Wong @ Hong Kong.
 
Christian Schulz said:
oh thnxx, nice link!

So with 48Bit I'm able to adress (only) up to 137 GB?

Is there a magic barrier at 128GB AND at 137GB?

And just one more question: It doesn't matter which Revision my board is?

Christian
Click to expand...

From a copy of the ATA/ATAPI standard...

"The optional 48-bit Address feature set allows devices with
capacities up to 281,474,976,710,655 sectors or
approximately 281 tera sectors. This allows device capacity
up to 144,115,188,075,855,360 bytes or approximately 144 peta
bytes. In addition, the number of sectors that may be
transferred by a single command are increased by increasing
the allowable sector count to 16 bits."

When a motherboard has support for 48 bit addressing, it can handle
huge disks. Buying a 250GB disk would be no problem at all.

The previous level was 28 bit sector addressing (512 bytes per
sector). That is what defined the "limit" of 128GB, before the
BIOS added support for 48 bit addressing. (2**28)*512.

The Asus webpage doesn't mention a need for a particular board
revision, so just flash a recent enough BIOS, as listed on the
page, and it should work. Of course, you need support in the
OS, for 48 bit addressing as well - I think Win2K and WinXP
are good candidates, with the right service pack. You might
Google on "enablebiglba" for some background info - if you have
a slipstreamed XP SP1 install disk, there is no need to worry
about "enablebiglba".

After the disk is installed and formatted, always test the disk
by transferring more than 128GB of data to it. If the file system
is corrupted when slightly more than 128GB of data is added to
the disk, then you didn't install it right. It is better to test
it, before putting live data on it, to make sure there aren't
any issues with the 128GB limit.

HTH,
Paul
 
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