SATA drives and controllers...

[Mini-Me]

Howdy.
:)

Now, we all know about the PATA BIOS limitations with drive capacities we were all seeing a few years ago. In a modern motherboard, I doubt that there is any issue at all with PATA drive capacities(assuming that modern motherboards still have a PATA port), but does SATA have any such capacity barriers either now or in the near future?

I imagine that when SATA was being developed and refined, that capacity barriers were given some thought and therefore with SATA, this becomes something of a non-issue

SATA1 and SATA2 are both of interest to me in this respect.

Is it up to the chipset manufactures or does the SATA spec allow for drives up to and including, say, 64TB or some other common barrier figure such as 128TB that we are unlikely to see for some time yet?

[mjc]

If I recall, it is something like an unlikely to hit any time soon number...not unless they start using platters the size of dinner plates, again...

Just as I thought...ungodly numbers...

With 48-bit addressing the limit is 144 petabytes (144,000,000 gigabytes).

And all modern BIOSes are using 48 bit addressing.

[Mini-Me]

...not unless they start using platters the size of dinner plates, again...

LOL!!!!!!
:D
:D
:D

Funny...
:)

Well, with 144 million GB, I doubt I need ever worry again...
:p

Thanks.

[Paul Komski]

144,000,000 gigabytes is fine as far as the BIOS is concerned but remember that the OS has to function as well and for 32-bit OSes this comes sooner than one might think at 2.2 terabytes.

[jlreich]

Paul, I was actually trying to find the answer to this a couple of weeks ago and from what I found at MS, and a couple other links, seemed to say that the 2TB limitation has to do with partitions with regards to the NTFS file system. But then a couple of times it seemed they alluded to it being about the size of a physical drive, and once about total drive space. I also felt that the info was out of date. So I left feeling the limitation was a partition limitation, but not quite certain.

Can you help clear this up?

[mjc]

Yeah there are OS imposed limits, or more specifically file system limits...but they can easily be worked around by limiting the partitions. Some of the Linux file systems have outrageous size limits...somewhere in the neighborhood of the BIOS limits or greater.

Like ext4...The ext4 filesystem can support volumes with sizes up to 1 exbibyte[6] and files with sizes up to 16 TiB (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4)