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Subject:
How do disks greater than 10 Gbyte work
Category: Computers > Hardware Asked by: vaac-ga List Price: $5.00 |
Posted:
09 Mar 2005 20:26 PST
Expires: 08 Apr 2005 21:26 PDT Question ID: 490818 |
Could anybody explain to me, or refer me to a website, book, or journal article, either free or to be paid for, which explains, how the new computers handle hard disks greater than 10 gigaherz. It seems to me that if a hard disk has 1023 cylinders, 244 sides and 63 sectors, which equals 1023*244*63= about 10000000 sectors this is all that interrupt 13 can handle. |
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Subject:
Re: How do disks greater than 10 Gbyte work
Answered By: maniac-ga on 14 Mar 2005 18:41 PST Rated: |
Hello Vaac, I believe you are referring to the concept of "cylinder", "head", and "secton" (CHS) to refer to a high capacity disk drive. Yes, indeed the CHS method has a limit to roughly 8 Gbytes of data on a disk. However, several years ago, the disk vendors (and OS and BIOS vendors) started to use a concept called "Logical Block Address" (LBA) to access the sectors on a disk. The older 28 bit LBA is sufficient to address up to roughly 137 Gbytes and the newer 48 bit LBA is sufficient to address over a hundred terabytes of data on a disk. For more information, see pages like: http://neasia.nikkeibp.com/archive_magazine/nea/200003/cmpo1_mar.php (published in 2000) which has a nice summary of the concepts involved or http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/bios/biosInt13h.html a page in the middle of a hard disk explanation explaining the limit of the "Int 13" and extensions made since that time (go to the next page...) or more quickly at http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/bios/size.html which is an index of SEVERAL disk limits over a pretty broad range. Another site http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/modes.htm has a similar summary with pretty much the same conclusions. So in brief, the old Interrupt 13 limit is worked around in a variety of methods that require some combination of capability in the BIOS and/or OS. For example, if you use a large disk on an old PC, it may be necessary to put the boot loader and OS in a partition near the start of the disk (so the BIOS can load them) and then the OS accesses the disk directly (bypassing the BIOS) to get the full capacity of the disk drive. There is no real need to make a large number of partitions in this case - I've worked with as few as three (boot partition, swap partition, OS & data partition) under Linux and it works just fine. Search phrases used cylinder head sector disk capacity CHS LBA comparison --Maniac |
vaac-ga
rated this answer:
very good answer |
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Subject:
Re: How do disks greater than 10 Gbyte work
From: filip04-ga on 09 Mar 2005 21:16 PST |
first of all 10,000,000 sectors doesn't mean 10,000,000 bytes, therefore not 10gigabytes. There is usually 512bytes per sector, so for your number of 10million sectors, that would be 5,120,000,000 bytes, or 5,000,000kb or about 4880mb or about 4.7GB. Although harddrive manufactuers don't usually specify the amount of tracks, heads, and sectors/track, they usually tell you how many sectors the whole harddrive has. for example: WD CaviarŪ WD3200JD has 625,142,448 sectors (320GB) Here is a little info on barriers: http://www.maxtor.com/_files/maxtor/en_us/documentation/white_papers/big_drives_white_papers.pdf |
Subject:
Re: How do disks greater than 10 Gbyte work
From: vaac-ga on 13 Mar 2005 21:15 PST |
Thanks,filip04-ga. for your comment and link "http://www.maxtor.com/_files/maxtor/en_us/documentation/white_papers/big_drives_white_papers.pdf" It got me to a website explaining that interrupt 13 gets away with the difficulty by havig "extensions" Would you or anybody know where I can find out more about these extensions and how to partition a large disk into as many as possible partition and what the number of sectors per cluster must be in each of such such partitions? |
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