Are hard drives greater than 137GB compatible with T42's ?

[Matt_]

I plan to do some basic video editing. The 2373-CWU T42 thinkpad that I have on order comes with a 80GB 5400rpm hard drive.
The advice I received on another forum was to purchase a seperate faster hard drive.
I'm new to this, and therefore there's been a big learning curve for me.
I've been reading about a situation regarding using a hard drive with a capacity greater than 137GB

April 2003 issue of PC World magazine Page 115

Initially, Hitachi's 180GB Deskstar 180GXP drive would not run on our Windows XP Pro-equipped Dell Dimension 8200 test system, although the same PC had no difficulty with Maxtor drives up to 300GB. The problem, we learned, stemmed from differences in how companies implement the new 48-bit addressing standard for recognizig drives over 137.4GB; we solved it by updating Intel's Application Accelerator driver to a version that jibed with Hitachi's implementation. Depending on your setup, drives over 137.4GB may work flawlessly or they may require you to update drivers, the BIOS, the operating system, or all three And you may still have problems with older motherboard chip sets.

And as this thread points out, if I don't ensure ahead of time that everything will be compatible, then the result can be a corrupted hard drive.
I talked to a rep. from the company Granite Digital that makes the hard drive enclosure that I have in mind, and he said that their enclosures will work just fine with any hard drive up to 2 terrabytes.
I almost have the pcmcia firewire picked out, and Compusa is having a great sale on a 200GB Hitachi internal hard drive.
The last step is finding out whether (anyone knows if) the T42 has the right BIOS and chipset to recognize a hard drive greater than 137GB.

Thank you in advance for your help

[size=small](There is some more information on the subject here[/size]

[itsramesh]

matt,

since it is going to be an external hard drive, the bIos has nothing to do with it. If your laptop has windowsXP servicepack 1 installed (which it shd have), it can see drives larger than 137gb.

Also cheap USB/firewire enclosures are available at www.dealsonic.com

hope that helps.

[Daniel]

Sorry to go off topic, but does anyone else remember the old HDD size limitations? Something like 600MB, then 2.0GB, then 8.xxx. It reminds me of my first computer. DriveSpace, DoubleSpace.. man o man..

[Matt_]

since it is going to be an external hard drive, the bIos has nothing to do with it. If your laptop has windowsXP servicepack 1 installed (which it shd have), it can see drives larger than 137gb.

Also cheap USB/firewire enclosures are available at www.dealsonic.com

Hi itsramesh

I apologize that it has taken me awhile to reply -- IBM had notified me that it would likely be awhile before my laptop would be shipped. Therefore I thought I would have enough time to finish researching this. Instead, my laptop arrived early and I've had to drop this long enough until I can partition my laptop's hard drive and spend a little time setting up the laptop.

It's a huge relief to hear that I can use large hard drives with the laptop hassle-free. Besides using it for video-editing, I'll (once I buy it) go ahead and use it for backing up my laptop's hard drive.

Once I'm ready to buy and partition the enclosure and hard drive, how will the partitions show up ? i.e. suppose I partition it four ways. When I plug this external hard drive into the firewire cardbus card, will all four of those partitions automatically be assigned a drive letter by Windows XP ?

I appreciate your suggestion about dealsonic. I had spent a long time at the cd/dvd burning forums (particularly because they were about the only places where I could find comments about enclosures and the different chipsets that the enclosure manufacturers use) researching comments and experiences. While I realize that there are people who have been pleased so far with the types of enclosures sold at places like dealsonic and newegg.com, I've been bothered by an equal number of complaints about them concerning premature hard drive failure from heat, poor manufacturer (chipset firmware) support, poor quality of enclosure materials, problems with particular chipsets such as "Prolific", inadequate cooling whether via fans or aluminum enclosure.

My reason for being willing to spend the extra $ on the enclosure from Granite Digital is that I would rather try to buy a product from a company that has experience, will be around for awhile to support the product, that will support the chipset with firmware updates, has a product with high-quality case construction and cooling, etc.

Sorry to go off topic, but does anyone else remember the old HDD size limitations? Something like 600MB, then 2.0GB, then 8.xxx. It reminds me of my first computer. DriveSpace, DoubleSpace.. man o man..

Our family's first computer was a Zenith 386/16
Good grief -- the monitor and the computer each weighed a ton.
I remember when we replaced the hard drive in it -- compared to today's laptop hard drive, the thing looked gargantuan.
And I still have two or three years' worth of issues from WordPerfect magazine. It's fun looking through some of them and seeing the prices for the hard drives and the early laptops. I think a several hundred megabyte harddrive sold for easily several hundred dollars. And a several gigabyte hard drive for companies was priced in the thousands of dollars.
I had learned how to use As-Easy-As (a Lotus 1-2-3 type spreadsheet) which came on a 5 1/4" disk.

[ZPrime]

yes, the partitions should be given drive letters automagically. you will have to slice the drive up in disk management on your own though.

Personally I see no point to partitioning a drive, especially not an external one... unless you need to format each partition differently. (one FAT32, one Apple or something?)

It wouldn't surprise me in the least if Granite Digital is just re-labelling some other manufacturers controller chips. I've got a "byteCC" enclosure, which uses the popular marvell bridge chip and have had zero problems. it even has a cooling fan. anything above $20-30 for a little bridge board, PSU, and casing is highway robbery... which is why I'd avoid Granite Digital.

I respect their wisdom in the realm of SCSI, as they've been building SCSI stuff for a LONG time... but the playing field for firewire is relatively new and I find it hard to believe that they are doing anything different from anyone else.