> > What 137GB boundary? I'm looking at buying a 160GB drive RSN.
> > Are we STILL running into stupid software/BIOSes? 512MB, 8GB and
> > now 137GB?
> > R
>
>       IIRC the 137GB boundary is a result of LBA, which of course
> was a patch to get more then around 500MB of storage on a hard drive.
>
>       It's easy math: LBA is 28 bits, biggest unsigned number
> that 28 bits can represent is:
>
> 2^28 = 268 435 456 sectors
> Each sector on an IDE disk (with very few exceptions) is 512
> Bytes, therefore:
> 268435456 x 512 = 137 438 953 472 bytes = 128GB (or 137GB in the
> hard drive version of GB)
>
> There is an extension to LBA called LBA32 which uses 32 bits of
> data to represent the sector. I believe to you use it you need OS
> and BIOS support, although you might no longer need BIOS support
> (unless your boot partition exists above the 137GB boundary, in
> which case your bios won't see the boot partition and your system
> won't boot!).
>
> As for your comment: "Are we STILL running into stupid
> software/BIOSes?" the answer is: of course we are. And we always
> will. The amount of storage must always be addressed. The
> addresses must always have a finite number. Until some scheme is
> used where the amount of bits used to represent storage is
> encoded (and variable) we will always hit limits like this. This
> is a fact of life.
>
> TTYL

        Woops, minor correction, new LBA is 48 bits, not 32:
http://www.transcendusa.com/Mem/Drv/lba.PDF

Sorry bout that. TTYL

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