what size hard drives do you guys have w/ Win98SE or WinXP?

bjn70

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I was wanting to upgrade the hard drives in my desktop computer, and noticing all the big hard drives advertised by BestBuy, CompUSA, etc. I decided I would do some research to see what the limit was under 98SE. Without extensive research it seems that you can go to about 127Gb partitions if you fix a couple of 98SE problems. It may be the same under XP. I don't think I'm ready to go to NTFS. So if you buy a 300Gb hard drive I guess you have to either partition it into multiple smaller drives or do some other tricks to access all of it.
 

IsaacHayes

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I'm runnign XP with a RAID10 setup with 6 250gig 10,000 RPM SATA drives. I WISH!!! haha
I'm running a SATA150 80gig WD 7,200RPM drive with XP. NTFS though.

NTFS is pretty nice actually unless you need to access the drive with "vintage" OS'es. But you'll have to use partitions just like in the old days of Win3.1/Win95/WinMe if you have very large HD's and want to stick with FAT.
 
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mccavazos

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I have a 200GB drive SATA, NTFS 2 100 GB partitions actually one 100 and one 92 i think. Have the OS on the 100, My docs and som larger games on the 92.
 

GeoffChan

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I have 3 machines all running XP

1st PC 80GB Maxtor ATA100, 320GB WD as a Storage Drive
2nd PC 60GB WD
3rd PC 250 WD SATA, 320GB WD SATA as a Storage Drive
 

turbodog

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Win 98se with fat32 partitions will handle a 2TB partition.

That said, there are several bios limitations you will encouter before that.

Most bioses over 1.5 years old (???) won't handle over 127 GB drives without a software overlay. These s/w fixes are available for free from the drive mfg.


FYI: fat32 won't allow a SINGLE file to be over 4GB in size.

I figure modern ntfs will handle the same or larger partitions.


I've got a machine running dual 300GB drives in raid1 config. The mootherboard handled the drives, and they are a single drive letter. But this is win2k and ntfs.


Also, XP requires service pack 1 to handle drives over 128GB. It involves a problem in the file system and/or the o/s calls to the bios. If you don't patch it, the drive will show up, but be all bad clusters after a certain size. But, then again, who doesn't have sp1 loaded! Hopefully you have sp2 by now anyway.
 

bwaites

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Win XP running twin Raid 1 320 GB SATA drives.

I partitioned at 80 Gigs so that I could perform maintenance ops easier on each drive and it wouldn't take so long.

Bill
 

offroadcmpr

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60 gigs on a dell laptop running XP pro. it is probably the lowest quaility, but I don't even know what raid 1 is, so it probably wouldnt matter.
 

jtr1962

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I have a 200 GB drive on a Promise Ultra100Tx2. Win98SE works just fine with it. As TD said, Win98 and FAT32 can handle drives up to 2TB just fine, provided the BIOS or addon card recognizes it. I believe there might be a problem with a 200GB drive if you're using the default Windows IDE drivers though. I heard, perhaps incorrectly, that they can't deal with 48-bit LBA. My drive on the Promise card is using the Promise IDE drivers under windows. In any case, if the Windows drivers don't work with 28-bit LBA but your motherboard BIOS has 48-bit LBA you can always run the drive in MSDOS compatibility mode.
 

cratz2

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I used to have a Win 2000 Server running 4 80GB drives at RAID1.

I currently have my main system which has 4 80GR drives and 1 60 GB drive. The 60 GB drive has the OS and text and HTML documents and the 80s have everything else... movies, MP3s, a few games. If possible, it's best to have your OS on one drive and controller and your pagefile and high demand apps on another drive and controller.

My XP machine is a 233MHz/192MB laptop with a 2.3GB drive. Takes a while to boot but after that, it runs surprisingly quick considering the specs.
 

bjn70

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This week Best Buy has 120Gb Seagates on sale for a good price so I might get a pair of them.
 

eluminator

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geepondy said:
I know the 127G limit was BIOS limited, is it also OS limited?

Yes. A PC can only address 137 GB with 32 bit addresses, so a change was made to use 48 bits. With XP a service pack will do it. I think it's SP1. With Win 2000 you need two things. A service pack (somewhere around SP3) and also a change to the registry:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305098
 
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