how big an external hard drive?

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G

Guest

I want to purchase an external hard drive to store a large quantity of
photos. I've read that I should first ascertain "how big a hard drive [your]
PC can support." My Dell has a 40 GB hard drive. Will it support a 250 GB
external?
 
The external drive is USB or Firewire. Unlike an internal
IDE drive that depends on the BIOS and mobo for support, the
external drives depend on USB (hope you have USB 2.0 or
you'll be very unhappy with the slow speed of USB 1.1) the
external drives enclosure includes the support. Get as big
as you wish and can afford.


|I want to purchase an external hard drive to store a large
quantity of
| photos. I've read that I should first ascertain "how big a
hard drive [your]
| PC can support." My Dell has a 40 GB hard drive. Will it
support a 250 GB
| external?
| --
| marcia
 
This will be down to the BIOS in the external hard drive enclosure. If you
are buying one ready built then the answer is as big as you like. I've got
a 400 GB external on a 5 1/2 year old PC.
 
Thank you!
--
marcia


M said:
This will be down to the BIOS in the external hard drive enclosure. If you
are buying one ready built then the answer is as big as you like. I've got
a 400 GB external on a 5 1/2 year old PC.
marcia said:
I want to purchase an external hard drive to store a large quantity of
photos. I've read that I should first ascertain "how big a hard drive
[your]
PC can support." My Dell has a 40 GB hard drive. Will it support a 250
GB
external?
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
I want to purchase an external hard drive to store a large quantity of
photos. I've read that I should first ascertain "how big a hard drive [your]
PC can support." My Dell has a 40 GB hard drive. Will it support a 250 GB
external?
Click to expand...

Stock XP will *NOT*. XP SP1 or greater is needed to handle a 250gb.
W2K can also handle it, I don't know what service pack is needed.

W98SE can handle it but the formatting tools will lie to you. I would
assume ME can handle it but I can't confirm this.
 
Loren said:
I want to purchase an external hard drive to store a large quantity of
photos. I've read that I should first ascertain "how big a hard drive [your]
PC can support." My Dell has a 40 GB hard drive. Will it support a 250 GB
external?
Click to expand...


Stock XP will *NOT*. XP SP1 or greater is needed to handle a 250gb.
W2K can also handle it, I don't know what service pack is needed.
Click to expand...


External is NOT on the IDE subsystem, which is what the patches for W2K
and XP fix.
 
Bob said:
External is NOT on the IDE subsystem, which is what the patches for W2K
and XP fix.
Click to expand...

Bob, that's interesting as i've been told that max size for Win XP
without SP1 is 133GB but, reading ur post, that must be on the IDE.

I think u r saying that limitation does NOT apply to external USB or
Firewire drive--only internal/IDE drives.

and i believe u r correct as i do not have SP1 and my external drive
160GB IS being recognized by the system (Win XP HE) without problems....

Am i understanding u right?
 
How to explain. The problem is NOT the drive size. It is a problem with
the ATAPI(ATA Packet interface) driver, (and MAYBE the motherboard BIOS
for the IDE interface) which is the IDE system is using. If the
attached drive is not using the "bad" ATAPI driver then the entire drive
capacity is seen. USB, SCSI, FIREwire are not using the broken driver,
so there is not a problem with that.

Please read the attached article for what is being fixed.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013/en-us
 
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