Maxtor 300 manual Dos

Breaking the 137GB Storage Barrier

of the hard disk was accessible. This inability to access the entire drive is referred to as a “capacity barrier” and it has been seen and overcome many times in the computer and disk drive industry.

The 137-gigabyte barrier is the result of the original design specification for the ATA interface that provided only 28 bits of address for data. This specification means a hard disk can have a maximum of 268,435,456 sectors of 512 bytes of data which puts the ATA interface maximum at 137.4 gigabytes.

10,000,000

1,000,000

100,000

10,000

1,000

100

10

Win2000	137GB
WinME	WinXP

			Win98 33GB
		Win95(osr2)		8GB
	Win95A		4GB
			2GB
	Win 3.x
DOS 5.x
		528MB
4.x	128MB
3.x	32MB
10MB	16MB

1980	1985	1990	1995	2000	2005
10 megabytes:early	PC/XT limit
16 megabytes:	FAT 12 limit
32 megabytes:	DOS 3.x limit
128 megabytes:	DOS 4.x limit
528 megabytes:	Early ATA BIOSs without BIOS extensions
2.1 gigabytes:	DOS file system partition limit
4.2 gigabytes:	CMOS extended CHS addressing limit (not widely experienced)
8.4 gigabytes:	BIOS/Int13 24-bit addressing limit
32 gigabytes:	BIOS limit

A-2 Quickview 300 80/100/120/160/200/250/300GB PATA