500 gig HD to MOBO?

[KA5LQJ]

Good Afternoon All,

Yes, it's still barely afternoon here in Shreveport, LOL! #Wx is nice and I'll be outside in a few working on building antennas before the rain this afternoon.

I have an old (this one) computer that uses an IWill K266 plus/35104A motherboard. #It has an AMD Athlon 1.2 gig CPU with 1,048,576k of P-133 RAM and an Award PNP bios Ext v 1.0. #At present, I have a Maxtor 6Y080L0, 78 gig hard drive with WIN 2k Pro on it in single boot. #I do plan to change over to a 37 gig, WDC WD 400BB-75FRA0, 37 gig hard drive and put Kbuntu Linux on it.

Now, I don't know where to look as I can't seem to find information on this mobo set-up, but I'd like to add a 500 gig either external USB or internal hard drive that I could use to store all kinds of music...legally purchased either by CD or MP3's from legal sites. #I'm only going to store, music, pictures and my ham and scanner contacts. #The smaller drive will be just used for the linux programs #and maybe a copy of Debian, later. #

Does anyone know if this would work?

Respectfully,
73,

Don/KA5-LQJ

[WA9SVD]

Well no offense, but that computer IS getting on in age; the motherboard controller probably won't be able to handle a 500 GB internal drive, although a manufacturer's Dynamic Overlay might allow it.
The external USB drive might be a better choice, as it can easily be used on another computer.
But your description is a bit confusing. You now have a 78 GB drive with Win2K, and want to change to a 37 GB drive with Linux? perhaps you can explain a bit better; I still don't get your scheme. Are you planning on a dual-boot system?
But aside from the mobo not recognizing the 500 GB drive, your scheme could work.

[AC0H]

Quote[/b] (KA5LQJ @ Nov. 17 2007,13:05)]Good Afternoon All,

Yes, it's still barely afternoon here in Shreveport, LOL! #Wx is nice and I'll be outside in a few working on building antennas before the rain this afternoon.

I have an old (this one) computer that uses an IWill K266 plus/35104A motherboard. #It has an AMD Athlon 1.2 gig CPU with 1,048,576k of P-133 RAM and an Award PNP bios Ext v 1.0. #At present, I have a Maxtor 6Y080L0, 78 gig hard drive with WIN 2k Pro on it in single boot. #I do plan to change over to a 37 gig, WDC WD 400BB-75FRA0, 37 gig hard drive and put Kbuntu Linux on it.

Now, I don't know where to look as I can't seem to find information on this mobo set-up, but I'd like to add a 500 gig either external USB or internal hard drive that I could use to store all kinds of music...legally purchased either by CD or MP3's from legal sites. #I'm only going to store, music, pictures and my ham and scanner contacts. #The smaller drive will be just used for the linux programs #and maybe a copy of Debian, later. #

Does anyone know if this would work?

Respectfully,
73,

Don/KA5-LQJ

My current setup is a lot like yours.

I've got the same chip on an Epox mobo with 2, 120G IDE drives, 2 Gigs of Ram, the bigest, baddest NVIDIA AGP video card they make, dual booting WinXP Pro and 2 distros of Linux. It'll track the entire GPS satellite constellation in Nova for Windows without so much as a hiccup, while listening to Led Zepplin.

I've also got an outboard USB 500G drive for archive purposes. The drawback is, my, and probably your USB ports are 1.1 spec not the much faster 2.0. If you're going to go the outboard route pony up the extra $20 for a PCI USB 2.0 controller card.

[WA7KKP]

I assume you're wanting to add an EIDE/ATAPI hard drive -- you may have issues with the BIOS being unable to recognize that size -- that plagued many of the older computers.

I use SCSI, and I've never had problems with humongus drives . . . and if I have a wide SCSI card, I can add up to 15 drives, so my storage is pretty much limitless.

The only trick is finding surplus SCSI drives at swap meets, as most hackers don't know how to interface them. All you need is a good Adaptec AHA2940UW or better card, which have been selling for $10 or so.

I recently picked up 4 Seagate Elite 47GB drives (wide SCSI) for $2 each at a hamfest -- your mileage may vary.

Gary WA7KKP

[KB3NDN]

it might work - just make sure you get an IDE drive and not a serial ata - might have better luck with a USB drive - might need to update your bios (1.2 gig is not that old of a computer)

[W6TMI]

If you are not booting from that drive, the OS driver may see the geometry correctly where the BIOS won't.

[WA9SVD]

Quote[/b] (KB3NDN @ Dec. 13 2007,05:41)]it might work - just make sure you get an IDE drive and not a serial ata - might have better luck with a USB drive - might need to update your bios (1.2 gig is not that old of a computer)

Actually, an Athlon (original) with PC-133 memory IS getting a bit old; probably at least 4-5 years old. MoBo's of that vintage mostly had BIOS limits of either 32 GB or 137 GB. Connecting a drive with higher capacity could hang the system. Sometimes there was a jumper to limit recognized capacity to 32 GB, and the manufacturer's Dynamic Overlay could be use to modify the MBR so that full capacity could be realized, but not always.

BTW, with today's PATA/IDE drives ( 7200 RPM UDMA 100 or UDMA133) there's little performance advantage to using SCSI, and for the inexperienced, SCSI can be a pain to set up. The price premium for SCSI is usually not warranted. Although SCSI can have some advantages, it's just more trouble than it's worth for most users. (Just adding the SCSI card can cause problems that Microshaft and Adaptec took four weeks to figure out with Win98SE. MS never got it, Adapted finally figured out the "Punt and Pray" had to be disabled with a 2900 series PCI card. Thanks, Mr. Gates&#33
While SATA has some advantages in performance (especially SATA 300) a MoBo that's more than 3 years old will almost certainly NOT have provision for such drives, and the cost of an added PCI card isn't warranted, either.

All in all, the USB may be the best choice; although the USB 1.1 interface will be slow, the complete capacity should be usable without relying on the MoBo to identify and support the full capacity. (A USB 2.0 interface card IS a possibility, but will require disabling the USB ports on the MoBo if any, and SOME USB 2.0 cards can be a bit fussy about which PCI socket it inhabits. (Another undocumented feature of MS and "Punt and Pray," I presume.)

[VE3SRE]

If you're planning to go the USB external drive route, you'll probably want to format the drive as FAT instead of NTFS. That's because up until recently, Linux could read NTFS partitions but couldn't write to them.

So if you want to have your drive formatted so that both Linux and Windows can write to it you should format it as FAT. Nowadays some Linux distros have tools that allow them to write to NTFS.

If you're formatting a 500 GB hard drive as FAT, you'll need to use the hard drive manufacturer's disk utility because WinXP won't format a drive as FAT that's bigger than 32 GB (if I recall correctly).

Another possible way to go with your 500 GB drive is that instead of using a USB drive enclosure you can use a NAS (networked attached storage) enclosure box. That way your drive doesn't have to be physically connected to a computer...you can just plug it into a hub or router and then any computer on your household network can have access to it.

NAS enclosures are a bit more expensive...but they're starting to drop below C$100 in this part of the world. I got one recently for C$80.

73