Thinkpads Forum

Hello,

recently I acquired one of these colossal SelectaDock III docking stations for my 600X. I had no specific plans for it when I bought it, but now I think it might be nice to install a large hard drive (about 500GB) and use the dock instead of an external USB drive.

As far as I know the 600X has a hard drive size limit somewhere around 130GB. This limit does not seem to apply to USB drives - I have used one with 200GB for months, without running into any problems. Can anyone tell me if this limit would apply to a 3.5"-drive in the dock? And if so, could this limit be overcome by installing an UDMA controller card in one of the PCI slots, and letting this handle the drive?

Björn

I have a 250GB desktop hard drive in one of my SelectaDock III's. No single partition is larger than 120GB, but I don't know if that's necessary or not. I don't know if the the 600X has a hard drive limit like you suggest.

Phil.

The 600X does have a limit in its BIOS of recognizing and properly using drives over 128GB.

However, modern operating systems typically ignore the BIOS when using the hard drive, meaning you only need that BIOS when you boot.

So as long as the boot drive is under 130GB, the other drives can be as large as the hardware and OS can handle. For W2K, WXP or Vista, you should be fine with a 500GB drive.

Thanks a lot to both of you, that's good to know. I will give it a try then.

Björn

What about Windows 98SE?

schen wrote:What about Windows 98SE?

Probably the same limitations/work arounds apply, but I can't say for sure. I've run Win98SE on a docked 770E but at the time my hard drive was only 30GBs. Currently my 770E is running Win2000 SP4

Phil.