Newer HDs on older system
 

As usual, specs first: Athlon 1300 T-Bird, Asus A7V133 1.05 motherboard, 60GB IDE drive, 98SE installed on it.

My HD has <= 1GB left on it, so I need more space. I have a Windows XP full-install disc and wish to apply it to a new drive that will become the new Master, the bigger the better. The catch is that I'm not sure about the best way to go about getting my older hardware to accept and recognize newer > 120GB drives (such as <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Manufactory=&PropertyCodeValue=353%3A13428&PropertyCodeValue=0&PropertyCodeValue=0&PropertyCodeValue=0&PropertyCodeValue=0&description=&MinPrice=&MaxPrice=&SubCategory=14&Submit=Property">these</a>), and I'm not buying one unless I'm sure I can make it work.

Googling reveals divided opinions as to whether a BIOS update and certain drivers would allow humongous drives on this system, and I'm not sure whether any of the linked drives are compatible with the white-rectangle-with-40ish-pin-receptacle IDE cables I'm familiar with.

Thoughts?

Unless you want to buy a new controller, you want the Ultra IDE models. Serial ATA is something different, but sounds close enough that you can order the wrong thing by accident if you're in a hurry (like I did a while back!!)

Asus has an IDE driver update for your board that claims to handle 48-bit LBA addressing. If you get that you will probably be OK--you may also need the latest BIOS blast.

VSP,

My sister has that motherboard with an Athlon XP 1700+ on it. She has a Western Digital 120GB hard drive in hers as the primary master HD.

With the latest BIOS, it should work fine. If you get a Western Digital HD, it will be even better. I have seen their 200GB drives work on PCs of similar vintage with no issues (at least I remember so, memory is getting shot as I get older!). From what I remember, WD drives didn't need UDMA133 cards to work with UDMA100 buses and > 128GB partition sizes.

If worse comes to worse, you can just drop a PCI card in and that will work OK (I did that for Margie's old Celeron 500 when I got her a Maxtor 80GB HD).

The only thing I would get if I were you would be a ton of RAM for XP. That motherboard will take 1.5GB of PC133 SDRAM. (however, I'd recommend a minimum of 512MB for XP Service Pack 2).

For the price of the added RAM, you can get a decent Socket A motherboard that takes DDR, will accept your CPU, and would have UDMA/133 support. You're going to be installing XP anyway, so you might as well take advantage of it :).

Mitch

As far as the motherboard and 1700+ go, the 1.05. (note trailing dot) revision has been known to accept faster Palominos with a BIOS update. 1.04 and 1.05, well, there are LOTS of conflicting reports, and I don't want to throw money into a questionable update that probably wouldn't speed my system up all that much. At this point, I'm not looking to speed things up as much as I am looking to obtain a little room for growth.

Current RAM = 640MB (256, 256, 128 SIMMs in that order).

If I'm buying a new motherboard, new RAM and a new drive, hell, I might as well leave this one as-is and build a whole new box, and I don't know that I want to pump out quite that much cash right now. (Cue the cameras watching me trolling eBay for old $100-ish laptops.)

Completely confused as to why this is a problem? Solutions include partitioning the drive into smaller disk drives. Most drive manufacturers also include BIOS extenders for disk drives. Worst case, buy a plug-in card that replaces motherboard BIOS with one that is larger. Many solutions - many that are kludges. But they all work. Used them all at one time or another.

In which case....
 

VSP,

A Western Digital hard drive will work fine. If it'll work in a Dell Dimension 8200 (older Pentium 4 with the evil RDRAM chipset), it should work with yours.

Besides, the 200GB 8MB Cache 7200RPM version of that hard drive is incredibly fast.

Mitch