Maximum supported hard disk drive size

According to
http://www.soyo.com.tw/kb/kbdesc.php?id=27
the maximum supported hard disk drive size on Soyo 5EHM motherboard is
about 80 GB. What is the exact value of this limitation? What is this
number based on? I ask this because 80 GB seems a quite artificial
restriction. There are also other weird sizes mentioned in the Soyo
support pages for other motherboards, like 100GB and 120GB in addition to
the usual 8.2GB, 32GB and 137GB limitations. Is this planned obsolescence?

Ville

John <> wrote:

> its an old board, 80 gb was huge back then

This is true. But 80 GB is a value that is not usually associated with
BIOS hard disk size limitations, neither is 100 GB or 120 GB. Could it be
possible that these boundaries have been made intentionally? Bumping the
limitation up by 20 GB and then again by 20 GB does make sense only if the
manufacturer deliberately wants to make the product obsolete in the
future. If this 80 GB BIOS bug really exists, then it would have been a
good idea to support all the way up to 137 GB HDDs (or more correctly
127.5 GB) in the more recent mainboards instead of 100 GB or 120 GB.

Michael J. Apollyon <> wrote:

> These were probably just the largest drive capacities
> available when the document was written or systems
> tested...

Yes, this could be the case.

> there's always a work-around (overlays, pci ide cards, etc.)

It would also be possible to install a new drive as a slave and to boot
the computer from another, smaller drive. GNU/Linux does not need BIOS HDD
support after boot-up. The only downside would be more noise (two HDDs).

Ville