External USB Hard Drive - Addressing limit?

[Roby]

Does the built-in electronics in an external USB hard drive take
care of addressing so that partition size limit imposed by the BIOS
(e.g., "137gB") doesn't matter?

I bought an enclosure, am shopping for a drive to build an external
HDD to use for backup of several machines ... including two born
ten years ago. I tried my other USB drive (80gB, one partition)
on one old-timer (AOpen P200 vintage 1996). It saw the whole drive
with no problem. Is that typical or should I plan on partitioning
to suit the machine with the lowest BIOS limit?

Roby

 

[paulmd]

Does the built-in electronics in an external USB hard drive take
care of addressing so that partition size limit imposed by the BIOS
(e.g., "137gB") doesn't matter?

The BIOS limit shouldn't apply, but the OS may still have that same
137GB limit anyway.

 

[pen]

Does the built-in electronics in an external USB hard drive take
care of addressing so that partition size limit imposed by the BIOS
(e.g., "137gB") doesn't matter?

I bought an enclosure, am shopping for a drive to build an external
HDD to use for backup of several machines ... including two born
ten years ago. I tried my other USB drive (80gB, one partition)
on one old-timer (AOpen P200 vintage 1996). It saw the whole drive
with no problem. Is that typical or should I plan on partitioning
to suit the machine with the lowest BIOS limit?

Roby

That's typical.

 

[Rod Speed]

Roby wrote

The BIOS limit shouldn't apply, but the OS
may still have that same 137GB limit anyway.

Nope, the 137GB limit is due to the ATA drivers in Win.

Doesnt apply to external drives.