Will motherboard automatically recognise 60/80 gb hdd without a special program?

[narelle]

Hi. I have a Rhino VAP133-ACP motherboard put out by BenQ (Octek at time computer was bought in Dec. 1999). I would like to install a 60 or 80 gb 7200rpm Hdd. Will this board automatically recognise a bigger Hdd? At the moment I have a 20gb. I do not want to run a program (and therefore take up memory )that will help the computer recognise it.

I am looking at a Maxtor 60/80Gb 7200rpm Hard Disk Drive Viper, DiamondMax Plus 9 or a Seagate 80Gb 7200rpm Hard Disk Drive Barracuda IV. Could you advise me please or suggest something else?

What does ATA-133 mean? Does the 133 have a connection with the 133 in the motherboard name?
Could you also tell me where to look to find what is the name of the Hdd I already have, please?

Thank you very much for all your help, Narelle.


Manners open many doors. :)

[Budfred]

Welcome to http://www.pcguide.com/ubb/pcgubb.gif

You may be able to find the brand of the current drive by looking in Device Manager. If you can't, there are other programs like AIDA32 or Belarc that can scan your system and tell you or you can look on top of the drive.

In most cases a board that will recognise a 20gig drive is also going to be able to recognize a 60 or 80 gig drive. A Maxtor, Seagate or Western Digital would all be fine, go for 7200RPM with 8MB cache. If you watch the sales at the chain stores, you can find a drive for under $1/gig these days.

ATA133 is the speed of data transfer of the drive. Most modern boards don't really go that fast, so it is unlikely that a '99 board would, but it is probably ATA100 and an ATA133 will run fine on it, just a little slower...

[narelle]

Thank you very much Budfred for your information and quick reply

Narelle

[Paul Komski]

From:-
http://www.google.ie/search?q=cache:wyuTmux04wIJ:support.octek.com.au/Download/Manual/Manual/Socket370/Rhino%2520VAP133-ACP.pdf+VAP133-ACP&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

You will see that your mobo supports ATA 33 and ATA 66 HDDs. The 133 will work on it but not at it's maximum capability.

The 133 in the name relates to the VIA (PC-133) chipset it uses and the maximum FSB for an Intel CPU on it.

HDDs between 8 and 138 GB can generally be supported by an ATA Interface.

If you are using Win95, there is a 32GB limit to the size of HDD supported by the OS; this is overcome in newer versions of windows.

Some Award BIOS (which this M/B uses) may also have a 33.8GB size limit. If this is a problem then it can be overcome in a number of ways.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/size.htm

[narelle]

Thank you Paul. I have visited both sites and saved them for reading at leisure.

Narelle