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| The good thing about large capacity hard drive is that it provides plenty of disk space. The not-so-good thing is compatibility. Older operating systems do not support large-capacity hard drives bigger than 137GB. The following lists operating systems that support 48-bit large block addressing (LBA), able to access large-capacity hard drives beyond 137GB. Windows OS: Windows 2000 Pro SP-4, Windows XP SP-1 or SP-2 (Home or Pro Edition), Windows Server 2003. UNIX/Linux: Linux with kernel version 2.4.20 or higher, such as Red Hat Linux 9, SuSE Linux 9, Mandrake Linux 9.2, Fedora Core, etc. Some older motherboards supporting two SATA devices have their ports directly bridged with the system bus allowing each to act as an IDE device. With an operating system that does not support 48-bit LBA, disk space is accessible up to 137GB. The most viable approach to break the 137GB barrier without having to use an operating system that supports 48-bit LBA is to use a PCI controller card (such as, Promise Technology SATA150II, Silicon Image, Adaptec, etc) with SATA devices directly connected to it. Most new motherboards supporting four SATAs have data signaling ports linked by a separate chip (e.g., Silicon or Promise SATA link chip) enabling non-48-bit LBA operating systems like Windows 2000 SP-1 or Windows XP Pre-SP to access the entire disk space, once an appropriate driver is installed. |