[G4] Internal Hard Drive over 120 GB?

[Steve O'Neill]

Thanks, that clarifies why I saw ATA-2, -3, -6 etc on Apple's site and 
the store used ATA-133 and -66.  Typical of a store.

I guess another possible advantage is that the ATA-6 cards are 
frequently also 133, as opposed to Apple's internal 66.


Stephen Spector wrote:
> 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.
>