New HDD for T20. Where is the limit?

[mordoch]

Hi guys,

a friend of mine wants to upgrade the HDD in his T20 (PIII 700MHz, 2647-84G) and now I'd like to ask you, if there is a know limit of max capacity for that model? I could not find any information about that within the forum search.

Tia
grz
mordoch

[tomh009]

Any standard PATA (ie not SATA) disk should work. Standard disk sizes went up to 20 GB, but you can now install a 100 GB disk, for example.

[mordoch]

Hi,

Thank you.
Sure, PATA. But might there be a limit like the 32GB limit on older boards?

[tfflivemb2]

Hi,

Thank you.
Sure, PATA. But might there be a limit like the 32GB limit on older boards?

Not on these machines. They will take the largest PATA 2.5" hard drive that you can find, which is somewhere around 160GB at this point. Now there is discussion that their might be a limit at around 137GB (roughly), but that it is a windows issue, I believe. So to be on the safe side, I would stay under 120GB.

[tomh009]

The T20 used the Intel PIIX4M disk controller chip, which implements UDMA/33 (aka ATAPI-4). That, in turn, supports disks larger than 137 GB (I think some number of petabytes ...). So doing a 160 GB disk would not be a problem.

[Stargate199]

Any PATA hard drive will work. The 32GB limit refers to the size limitation of FAT32, the formating system used by Windows 95/98/ME. If you are planning to use those OS, you will need to format accordingly. Windows 2000/XP/Vista will use both FAT32 and NTFS (which has no capacity limit.).

[mordoch]

Thx a lot guys for that info.
I'll then buy some 120gig or 160gig drive within the next days.

Thanks and have a nice day.
mordoch