750GB limit? Why?

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 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
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Arno wrote:
larry moe 'n curly 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.

On Tue, 13 Apr 2010 05:02:46 +1000, "zappo" wrote:

Arno wrote:
larry moe 'n curly 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.
Likely to be a firmware sanity check limitation.

I have an Addonics ADSA4R-E adaptor on my Windows XP system.
I shows up in Device Manager as a Silicon Image SiI 3114 SATARaid
Controller.

Before I updated the firmware it hung will finding drives at
BIOS time if there was a with 750 gB drive attached. No problem
with 500 gB drives or if the 750 gB drive was powered up after
the BIOS time stuff. (I don't think powering a drive on a running
Windows XP system is officially supported for this adapter,
but it seems to work.)

I updated the firmware and now I have no problems with 2000 gB
connected. (I don't boot from the adaptor so I don't know
if it can actually boot from the large disks.)

Addonics told me that it simply was a matter of removing a
software sanity check in the adapter BIOS routines that only
run at startup, but I couldn't confirm this with Silicon Image, which
was the company that actually supplied the firmware update.

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?
As noted above, for the adapter that I have the limitation to
less than 750 gB is reported to have been due a sanity check
rather than a program error (such as getting a
32 bit unsigned number as a result and treating it as a 31 bit
number.)

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