[G4] Internal Hard Drive over 120 GB?

[Stephen Spector]

Uhh .. Some clarification regarding large drives. ATA-66, ATA-100, ATA-133
are all referring to the burst capacity of the controller ... The ability to
push data in bursts at that speed. All these differences do is affect the
speed with witch data is transferred. The REAL issue is the ATA controller.
The standard used in PCs and Macs prior to last year was called ATA-5. It
has NOTHING to do with the SPEED of the controller. The ATA-5 spec is
limited to 2^32 bits, which works out to 128gb. The address space simply
cannot see any more.

Starting with the MDD Macs, and using PCI cards (both PCs and Macs), they
support the ATA-6 standard which uses 2^44 bits to set the address space.
That works out to something around 5 petabytes ---abut 5 giga-giga bytes.
Right now the largest single drive is 250g but I expect that to increase as
arial densities increase and new tecyhnology allows the platters to support
faster and denser data.

Stephen