Why do some older hard drive controller BIOSes have problems with
drives larger than about 750GB or 1TB? IOW why are there limits at
750GB and 1TB, as there are at 8.4GB and 137GB?

Some affected controllers use the VIA 6420, 6421, and 8237x SATA chips
or Silicon Image 680 PATA chip. Silicon Image released a BIOS update
to take care of a 1TB limit on RAIDs.

larry moe 'n curly <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> Why do some older hard drive controller BIOSes have problems with
> drives larger than about 750GB or 1TB? IOW why are there limits at
> 750GB and 1TB, as there are at 8.4GB and 137GB?

> Some affected controllers use the VIA 6420, 6421, and 8237x SATA chips
> or Silicon Image 680 PATA chip. Silicon Image released a BIOS update
> to take care of a 1TB limit on RAIDs.

There should not be a limit in that range. The next one
is 32 bit (SCSI) sector numbers with 512 byte sectors,
i.e. 2TiB. I am not disputing your statement, I just do not
see a good explanation. Maybe planned obsolence?

Arno
--
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email: (E-Mail Removed)
GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F
----
Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans

Arno wrote:
> larry moe 'n curly <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>> Why do some older hard drive controller BIOSes have problems with
>> drives larger than about 750GB or 1TB? IOW why are there limits at
>> 750GB and 1TB, as there are at 8.4GB and 137GB?
>
>> Some affected controllers use the VIA 6420, 6421, and 8237x SATA
>> chips or Silicon Image 680 PATA chip. Silicon Image released a BIOS
>> update to take care of a 1TB limit on RAIDs.

> There should not be a limit in that range.

There is anyway.

> The next one is 32 bit (SCSI) sector numbers with 512 byte
> sectors, i.e. 2TiB. I am not disputing your statement, I just
> do not see a good explanation. Maybe planned obsolence?

Mindless conspiracy theory. Its MUCH more likely that someone ****ed up.