GMAN wrote:
> In article <>, wrote:
>> I know this board will only recognize up to 160 gig internal hard
>> drives, but will it recognize an external drive that's 250 gigs and
>> connected via USB? Thanks
>
> What? I have the little brother of this board, the P4P800 Deluxe and i am
> running a 750GB SATA drive off of the board.
>
> You should not have any problem with an external USB drive.
>
The USB issue is an issue that exists inside the enclosure.
Some external hard drive enclosures have issues with large
drives. I haven't seen a technical discussion of why a
USB to IDE or USB to SATA adapter chip in the enclosure,
should be having an issue, if the thing is operating
in 48 bit LBA mode. The 28/48 bit LBA limit is at 137GB,
so why should a USB enclosure chip choose to not work
with a 500GB or 750GB drive or whatever ? It
doesn't make much sense, but does seem to happen.
When shopping for an external USB enclosure, a
visit to Newegg and a read of the reviews, may
give some advance warning if there is a
limitation in the silicon used inside the
enclosure.
This is a Q&A concerning the Windows driver for the USB
mass storage device:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/usbfaq.mspx
"Q: Does usbstor.sys need to be modified to support
disks over 137 GB in size?
A: No. Support for disks that are larger than 137 GB
is not an issue for the USB mass storage class driver.
However, such support is an issue with the USB-ATA bridge
chip in the external USB storage device."
If you look at the block diagram of this example USB to SATA
bridge chip, there is actually an 8 bit microprocessor
inside the chip. The processor is an 8032, something from
a previous era, and it has 24K ROM and 23K RAM, and also
a provision for connecting an external flash device. So
this enclosure adapter, could be patched, if its firmware
had a bug in it. Some of the other ones, seem to
rely only on their internal firmware store, for
bug free operation.
http://www.prolific.com.tw/support/f...l2571_v1.6.pdf
Paul
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