I have an 3 year old Assus P3B-F motherboard and a Promise Fastrack card running under W98SE both of which supports UDMA 2/U ATA 33 (not sure of the difference between these two). I want to increase my hard drive space for movie making, but I'm concerned that because the latest drives are UDMA 100 and greater they will not be recognised by my motherboard/Fastrack card and either will not function, or default to an old standard that runs more slowly than the UDMA 33/U ATA 33 my system is capable of supporting. Can anyone tell me whether the latest drives automatically drop back to the level of my current system namely UDMA 33/U ATA 33.
Whilst ferreting around for an answer to my problem I spotted another possible gotcha in a not totally unrelated query. I believe there is a hard size limitation of 32GB if your kit is too old:
- Is this a formatting constraint somewhere or some other restriction?
- How do I find this out before I buy a drive?
- If this is just an fdisk formatting constraint presumably I'll beable to get over the problem by using Partition Magic (4.0) to do
the formatting?
Thanks in advance for any help,
Maurice
couple of pointers.
i bought a 120gb ibm drive and tested it in a ata-33 motherboard.
worked fine first time under windowsxp.
i then moved it to another ata33 motherboard machine but this time connected it to a highpoint ata133 pci card.
again worked first time.
what you may need to worry about is the bios on the pc being unable to see beyond say 32gb.But your fastrak card should get round that.
most retail packed hard drives come with installation software to get round such problems , or save the money buying a oem version and download the softare from the manufacturers site.
I have yet to find a pc made since intel bx motherboards that cannot be made to handle large capacity drives.