HD Question

[Armadel]

I just bought a 40gb Maxtor, 7200, ATA100.
This is to replace the HD that crashed in my older ASUS P5A.

The ASUS says it supports UDMA33.

Is this HD gonna work ok ?

thanks

[Martoch]

Sure thing...ATA/100 is backward compatible with slower speeds.

From Maxtor:

The ATA/100 specification defines a physical layer operating at 100 megabytes per second and is backward compatible with ATA/33 and ATA/66 enabled devices.

[EvilRick]

Should work just fine.

I have this mobo w/ ATA-66 drive that works good, last long time.

[griobhta]

A few years ago i put a UDMA 66 fujitsu hdd on a motherboard that only handled 33.

While the HDD worked alright i had to download a util from the fujitsu site to switch it to udma 33 to be able to enable dma on the drive at all.

So it will work but might need a little encouragement to run as fast as it can

g

[Armadel]

I was reading Maxtors site about something called MaxTrack.
They say to use it to FDISK and Partition instead of the ones that come with WIN98. It will install and run something called
Ez_BIOS

Something to do with WIndows 98 not supporting drives above 32gb.

I thought that was a BIOS issue rather than Windows.

Any recommendations on this ?

and thanks again :-)

[griobhta]

I think you will find that it is more that it doesn't support partitions over 32Gb rather than drives. Just partition the drive into two or more partitions.

ie
2 x 20Gb

g

[shahani]

Whenever you ask questions about such subjects, always mention your operating system.

If you have windows 2000 or XP, you don't need the EZBIOS. During the 2000/XP setup, you will be asked what type of partition you want and how large, etc. With 98, you can't see beyond 32GB so a small program is written in the boot sector which allows older OS to see the full capacity. During boot up you will see a blue "flag" informing you that EZ-BIOS has loaded up.

[Armadel]

is the operating system of choice.
Will I be ok if I use the regular fdisk and partition it as
C:= 8gb
D:=32GB

with the intention of having Windows on C: and everything else on D:
I prefer not to have any unnecessary software running.

thanks

[MaxVal]

An 8 GB Primary partition and the rest as an extended partition will work fine. Keeping the primary partition at 8Gb will keep the cluster size at 4kb, making more efficient use of disk space. Anything larger will bump the minimum allocation unit to 8kb, increasing file slack.
Not a major concern, but worth considering.
MAX