Dell Dimension 8300--Does the 137 GB drive limit apply?

  • Thread starter Thread starter jbweaver
  • Start date Start date
J

jbweaver

I have a Dell Dimension 8300 with a 875P chipset and 82801EB storage
controller--about 1 1/2 years old. I will be adding a new hard drive
and would like to install a large-capacity drive. I emailed Dell to
find out if this system was subject to the 137 GB drive limit or not.
They referred me to the not-so-clear Intel website I had already
visited. Can anyone give me the story on this? Thanks in advance
for your help.
 
Look at the motherboard, see if the manufacturer and model number is printed
on the board.
Try to access the bios and find out it date

Also this website has a program to test your bios for 48-bit, 48-bit is what
is needed for drives over 137GBs.
http://www.48bitlba.com/index.htm

Check out program 48bitlba
 
I have a Dell Dimension 8300 with a 875P chipset and 82801EB storage
controller--about 1 1/2 years old. I will be adding a new hard drive
and would like to install a large-capacity drive. I emailed Dell to
find out if this system was subject to the 137 GB drive limit or not.
They referred me to the not-so-clear Intel website I had already
visited. Can anyone give me the story on this?
Click to expand...

The Intel Application Accelerator are drivers that apply to many intel 8xx
chipsets and support 48 bit LBA.
Download version 2.3 t make sure you have the latest version.

cheers,
Peltio
With a 845E intel chipset, IAA and still no HD bigger that 80 GB.
 
I'm not expert at this, but I see that Dell will sell you an internal 400 GB
serial ATA drive for the machine. I believe that the parallel ATA ports
would also support LBA48 drives (> 137 GB). If you're really concerned about
it, you could try installing the latest BIOS update for your 8300, available
at support.dell.com. (It's version A07, dated October 1, 2004.)

Don't bother with the Intel Application Accelerator unless you intend to use
a pair of SATA drives in RAID 0 (striped) or RAID 1 (mirrored) modes. The
older versions of the Application Accelerator (really IDE drivers) won't
install on an 875P system (or on the very similar 865PE, which is what I
had). The newer versions are only useful for doing RAID, although they could
be installed with a single drive in a RAID-ready configuration.

You could consider an SATA drive or two, instead of a regular PATA drive.
There probably is no performance advantage at this time (SATA 1), but the
SATA drives are more avant garde, and they use nicer-looking cabling. (I'm
using a pair of 160 GB SATA drives in RAID 0. The main gain I get from this
is ten or 15 seconds in booting up XP, along with potentially reduced
reliability: lose one drive, and all the data are gone.)

Have fun.

Bob Knowlden

Address may be scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.
 
(snip)
There won't be anyway if your OS and/or usage pattern isn't using it to
it's advantage.
Click to expand...

I miss your point. Are you claiming that SATA is faster than PATA now, given
the right OS or application software? Or that one of the future versions
would be faster? Or are you advocating RAID?
Yeah, obviously when you loose a single drive, all your data is still
there.
Click to expand...

This seems disingenuous. Dead is dead, but, from my naive point of view, it
seems that the probability that one drive of a pair would fail is higher
than a single drive. (If the events were statistically independent, and the
probably of a single failure is much less than 1, than the probability that
at least one of a pair would fail would be nearly twice the probability that
a single drive would fail.) That said, I don't feel like a brave pioneer for
using RAID 0. I worried that my DOS-based utilities (Partition Magic 8,
Norton Ghost 2003) wouldn't work with the array, but everything has been
fine.
At your expence? Great, thanks.
Click to expand...

At whose expense? This reads like sarcasm, but it's incomprehensible.

If my comments appeared to be sarcastic, I apologize. Sometimes my
self-deprecation might appear to be directed at someone other than myself.
That's not my intent. I'm a hobbyist. My joy at getting a 10% performance
improvement in some benchmark might not be shared by someone who is more
interested in doing things with his PC than doing things to it.

I can live with criticism, but the original poster might have prefrerred a
positive suggestion or two.
 
Bob Knowlden said:
I'm not expert at this, but I see that Dell will sell you an internal 400 GB
serial ATA drive for the machine. I believe that the parallel ATA ports
would also support LBA48 drives (> 137 GB). If you're really concerned about
it, you could try installing the latest BIOS update for your 8300, available
at support.dell.com. (It's version A07, dated October 1, 2004.)

Don't bother with the Intel Application Accelerator unless you intend to use
a pair of SATA drives in RAID 0 (striped) or RAID 1 (mirrored) modes. The
older versions of the Application Accelerator (really IDE drivers) won't
install on an 875P system (or on the very similar 865PE, which is what I
had). The newer versions are only useful for doing RAID, although they could
be installed with a single drive in a RAID-ready configuration.

You could consider an SATA drive or two, instead of a regular PATA drive.
Click to expand...
There probably is no performance advantage at this time (SATA 1),
Click to expand...

There won't be anyway if your OS and/or usage pattern isn't using it to it's advantage.
but the SATA drives are more avant garde, and they use nicer-looking cabling.
(I'm using a pair of 160 GB SATA drives in RAID 0. The main gain I get from this
is ten or 15 seconds in booting up XP,
Click to expand...
along with potentially reduced reliability: lose one drive, and all the data are gone.)
Click to expand...

Yeah, obviously when you loose a single drive, all your data is still there.
Have fun.
Click to expand...

At your expence? Great, thanks.
 
Btw, you should setup your newsclient properly.

Bob Knowlden said:
I miss your point. Are you claiming that SATA is faster than PATA now, given
the right OS or application software?
Click to expand...

Actually, that is what you were disclaiming (if that's a word), isn't it?
Weren't you referring to Queueing which 'supposedly' is not available in SATA1?
Or that one of the future versions would be faster?
Click to expand...

Maybe. If the OS supports queueing and the drives support reordering, disk
IO may perform better (diminished seeking) and the system appear quicker.
Or are you advocating RAID?
Nope.


This seems disingenuous.
Click to expand...
Dead is dead,
Exactly.

but, from my naive point of view, it seems that the probability
that one drive of a pair would fail is higher than a single drive.
Click to expand...

To a point.
The chance that you get two drives that will never fail is probably
slimmer than the chance that only one fails and probably equal to
that both will fail within their service life.

Then there is the 50-50 chance of the one dying before the other
or the other way around.

And if it can die then by definition it is not reliable, period.
(If the events were statistically independent, and the
probably of a single failure is much less than 1, than the probability that
at least one of a pair would fail would be nearly twice the probability that
a single drive would fail.) That said, I don't feel like a brave pioneer for
using RAID 0. I worried that my DOS-based utilities (Partition Magic 8,
Norton Ghost 2003) wouldn't work with the array, but everything has been
fine.


At whose expense? This reads like sarcasm, but it's incomprehensible.

If my comments appeared to be sarcastic, I apologize.
Click to expand...

They appeared to be the comments of a parrot that doesn't understand what
he is parroting.
Sometimes my
self-deprecation might appear to be directed at someone other than myself.
That's not my intent. I'm a hobbyist. My joy at getting a 10% performance
improvement in some benchmark might not be shared by someone who is more
interested in doing things with his PC than doing things to it.

I can live with criticism, but the original poster might have prefrerred a
positive suggestion or two.
Click to expand...

And yours were?
 
Thanks for your help. For anyone else who has this question, the BIOS
in my Dimension 8300 does support 48 bit LBA. Enabling this may
require a recent flash BIOS update available from the Dell website.

Between the Dell system design and the installation software,
installing and setting up the drive were much easier than on earlier
systems I have owned. No additional drivers, etc., were required.

Thanks again. The help and other suggestion were much appreciated.
 
Back
Top