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HDD size question

baby duck monge

baby duck monge

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Feb 16, 2003
1,570
0
Memphis, TN
hey all -
i was looking at getting a 200 gig internal ultra ATA/100 western digital to add as another drive in my 2002 quicksilver (DP 1 ghz), but i thought i remembered from somewhere that drives over 137 gigs (or somewhere around there) were not supported unless a new controller card was purchased, or the drive was partitioned in a particular manner.
is there anyone who knows more about this that could shed some light on the subject for me? and if i have to partition the drive, will i lose extra space in comparison to a regular, unpartitioned drive?
thanks for any help, and please pardon my ignorance.
 
You're right, it can't see larger then 137GB. And you can't partition it, because the extra space cannot be seen in order to partition it. Go ahead and get yourself a PCI ATA/6 card and you'll have no problems seeing the entire shebang. It's really easy to install and use. Then you can have 4 disks in there if you want! Plus the speed of the ATA/6 is much higher then that of the ATA controller off your motherboard.
 
That's using the built-in ATA controller. If you purchase a PCI ATA/6, then you don't need to worry about it. I have 2x120GB and 2x200GB in my Quicksilver '01.
 
If you buy from OWC, you can buy SpeedTools from them which can enable larger drive support. If you need more than a couple of internal drives, you should buy a PCI card anyway.
 
curses.

oh well, i pretty much expected this. i will have to consider a few of the alternatives before i make my final decision. thanks everyone!!
 
RAID

Just to toss in another possibility, if it is true that the 2002 models can't (directly) work with drives larger than 128 (or 137) gigabytes, there's always the possibility of using multiple 80GB or 120GB drives in a RAID. I believe MacOS X itself has simple software RAID capabilities to make multiple drives act as one larger drive.

The upside is you can use cheaper drives to get a lot of storage space and speed. The downside is if one of the drives does go bad, you'll have to restore everything from a backup to the entire rest of the "RAID drive". It's a trade-off, but one which will work for you if you must have 160GB or more of disk space in a system that can't support that in one single drive.
 
ChrisFromCanada said:
I have your exact model, see sig. And I have an internal with no extra cards, and it reads all 189.97 Gigs so I think all of you are wrong.
Click to expand...

That has been reported. But the official word from Apple, and the official occurance with most hardware is 120/137GB is the top.
 
ChrisFromCanada said:
I have your exact model, see sig. And I have an internal with no extra cards, and it reads all 189.97 Gigs so I think all of you are wrong.
Click to expand...

anyone have an answer for this guy and why he seems to be able to do the impossible? personally, i'm confused about how he has 3 drives in there. though i guess he could only have an optical and no zip.

anyone, though? any ideas at all?
 
He only has 2 drives in there. An 80GB it probably came with, and a 200GB. The other drive is a firewire drive. As mentioned, there have been reports that larger disks work in Quicksilvers. I guess it depends on which ATA controller got put on the motherboard. The official party line from Apple says, only MDD Macs can hold the larger disks without 3rd party help. The hardware only seeing 128GB/137GB (binary/decimal) is in the majority.

Check out http://www.xlr8yourmac.com for more info.
 
yellow said:
He only has 2 drives in there. An 80GB it probably came with, and a 200GB. The other drive is a firewire drive.
Click to expand...

wow. so i totally missed the part where he said it was a FW drive. that's what posting on little sleep and after lots of work will do for ya.
 
freiheit said:
Just to toss in another possibility, if it is true that the 2002 models can't (directly) work with drives larger than 128 (or 137) gigabytes, there's always the possibility of using multiple 80GB or 120GB drives in a RAID. I believe MacOS X itself has simple software RAID capabilities to make multiple drives act as one larger drive.

The upside is you can use cheaper drives to get a lot of storage space and speed. The downside is if one of the drives does go bad, you'll have to restore everything from a backup to the entire rest of the "RAID drive". It's a trade-off, but one which will work for you if you must have 160GB or more of disk space in a system that can't support that in one single drive.
Click to expand...
so would it in theory be possible to RAID two+ partitions of the same drive?
 
homerjward said:
so would it in theory be possible to RAID two+ partitions of the same drive?
Click to expand...

Even if you could, I can visualize performance going into the trash.

As for performance being better, I doubt you'll ever see the extra performance due to one hard drive not being able to fill one channel's theoretical performance. One drive can't even exceed ATA/100's speed, much less that of anything faster, but it's nice to know you've got room, I suppose.
 
homerjward said:
so would it in theory be possible to RAID two+ partitions of the same drive?
Click to expand...
In theory, yes (though it'd be weird), but in practice, no. In either case, nothing over 137GB should show anyway, whether it's partitioned or not.

The suggestion was to get two 120GB drives and RAID1 those together, which would work fine if you're on OSX.

You could always go with an external FireWire case; if you shop carefully you should be able to find one that'll support big drives for about half the price of an extra ATA card (~$40).
 
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