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.
That would be my primary guess. Also, some drives used some non-standard
stop-gap solution until the ATA-[5/6] standards were out that officially
allowed to go beyond the 132GB limit. I'm not sure of Mac OS X supports
that hack.
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).
The Macs had no such issues in regards to FireWire drives, however
FireWire-ATA bridge controllers DID have this issue. So the same
ATA drive hooked up via FireWire may show up at full capacity or
as limited to 132GB depending in what FireWire enclosure (specifically
what bridge chip and firmware) is used.
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
I can tell you that I have no trouble with a 500GB partition HFSX on
my striped RAID in an G5, we also have no trouble with a 3TB partition
on an XServe RAID formatted with HFS+. So HFSX/HFS+ are certainly NOT
a limiting factor.
What version of Mac OS X are you using on it?
10.3.7
Same here, Mac OS X 10.3.7 has no issues with partitions bigger than
128GB in HFS+ or HFSX. However, there is something else to be checked:
do you have an old-style disk partitioning system with an HFS
wrapper file system around the HFS+ file system? If so, maybe there's
a size limitation for the HFS file system. You may have to nuke the
entire drive, and format with a non OS9 backwards compatible
wrapper-free
HFS+
Also, try w/o checking the OS9 disk driver installation option when
formatting.
It looks like Mac OS X 10.2 and later has a partitioning tool that
can support creating partitions/volumes greater then 128GB.
unfortunately not, I have even tried a recent Tiger disk
it certainly does, see above, I have partitions way bigger than 128GB.
maybe there is a problem related with the firmware,
which will be annoying as I don't think there were any releases for my
machine after the current one
Could be that it's an OS9 backwards compatibility issue. Also see above
for a semi-educated guess as to what might be an issue (wrapper file
system).
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