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Re: 128 GB limit

On Jan 4, 2005, at 1:17 PM, Shawn Erickson wrote: 

On Dec 18, 2004, at 3:19 PM, Anthony Minchinton wrote:

Hi Sam,
the 128 GB Hard Drive limit is well known to pc users as a BIOS issue, which I presume is the same for macs, based on the previous hard drive size limitations experienced by both pc & mac users.
Regards Tony.

Are you asking a question in regards to a particular computer system or OS release?

The limitation comes mainly from, at least in the Mac world, non-support for 48 bit LBAs (logical block addresses) in the disk drive controller and/or the ATAPI bus controller (or its firmware) used on a particular system. All mac systems made since late 2000 or early 2001 should have hardware support for drives greater then 128GB/130GB (depending on units being used) when attached via ATAPI buses (note firewire interfaces, etc. never had this particular limitation).

Also Mac OS X (Darwin) system supports very very large disks (and I believe it always has). Also the HFS+ file system that Mac OS X uses (Mac OS 8 & 9 used it as well by default IRCC) supports huge volumes as well... as default configured 64 TB in size I believe (<http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1150.html>).

This isn't a Darwin-specific discussion but I have something I need to ask.

I experienced a similar situation just recently with this limitation. I received as a gift a 200 GB IDE drive intending it to store primarily music files (yes, I have a ton). I dropped it in a Quicksilver G4 at the office and formatted. I then took it home along with an Oxford 911 FW enclosure and began ripping CDs over the Christmas holidays. I have a 15" Titanium powerbook and had connected the FW enclosure and new drive to it. I was nearing the end of my ripping adventure when the disk dropped off the machine with a common warning about properly disconnecting external volumes. I thought nothing of it and promptly unplugged and replugged the FW drive. Nothing. I rebooted, still didn't show. I ran Disk Utility which identified the firewire drive as 128 GB. Disk Utility failed on repairing it so I booted from a Disk Warrior CD which too identified that disk as 128 GB. The drive would not mount on the desktop and could not be repaired by anything. I reformatted, losing many many gig of music data in the process.

My question is: is there some technical limitation to firewire (specifically Oxford 911 bridges) to handling large-capacity drives? Forgive me if the answer's obvious, I've been busy re-ripping CDs.

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