Re: Are new Harddrives backwards comaptible with old boards?

On 2005-08-25, hswerdfe <hswerdfe@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I'm in the market for a new HD, but have not looked into it for several
> years
>
> my mother board
> http://www.giga-byte.com/Motherboard/Products/Products_GA-7ZXE.htm
> is from 2001, and has
> 2 x UDMA 33/66/100 bus master IDE ports on board.
>
> acording to the tech ***
>
> if I go into futureshop and by a new 160-250 GB harddrive and try and
> hook it up as primary slave. am I going to have any compatibility issues?

I've used IDE disks as big as 250 GB with various motherboards
of that era and have had no problems... except that the BIOSes
clipped the disk to 128 GB. Abit provided a BIOS upgrade for
their board, but Gigabyte didn't (and neither did Soltek IIRC).

If your boot partition is within the first 128 GB, it will
likely work even with an old BIOS. Once you've booted, the OS
takes over and the limitations of the BIOS don't apply any more
(at least that's the case with Linux). Worked for me with Abit
KT7A, Soltek SL-65KV2 and Gigabyte GA-BX2000.

> and the diffrence between Serial and parallel ATA?

"Parallel ATA" is good/bad old IDE. SATA is physically
incompatible (different connector). Boards from 2001 don't
support SATA.

--
André Majorel <URL:http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/>
(Counterfeit: ehub@xxxxxxxxxxxx sufud@xxxxxxxxxx)
"La presse doit diffuser des idées saines." -- Serge Dassault,
propriétaire de la Socpresse.
.