Thinkpads Forum

Hi all, I was planning on upgrading my 600X to serve as a file/backup server and I wondered whether they have support for large disks and have 48 bit LBA support or suffer from the 137gb limitation? A quick search around the forums yielded nothing on this topic. I would love to put a 250gb disc in it if possible. Thanks,

Welcome to the forum!

I have a couple 600X, but no big ATA drives. (I have a 320GB SATA, but that won't work.)

If you have another use for the drive, buy one and try it out. Or see if you can borrow one for a bit to try it.

My guess is that it will work, but you'd be wise to partition the drive so the entire boot partition is below 137GB so the BIOS can at least load the OS. The OS then can access the hardware directly, skipping the BIOS.

Another option you have is to use a 120GB or so internal drive, and use external large drives. That should work fine, provide more capacity, provide better cooling, and allow more flexibility... you'd also want a USB 2.0 CardBus card too.

Hi Thanks for the reply. I am going to try it out and see if these limitations apply, I will post here what the results are.

I understood that the 600X has a 137GB limit, but it is not 100% clear to me if that limit applies to the boot drive in its entirety or only to the size of the partitions on any particular drive.

I have a 300GB desktop drive installed in my SelectaDock III that works fine with 770 or 600 series machines docked, but I don't have a partition larger than 120GB on the drive. And that drive is not used as a boot drive.

Phil.

I think, tomorrow the postman will give me a new 160gig hdd. It's for an older HP from my brother - he doesn't like the black TP design - but first I will check out this hdd in my 600x.

Is the "portable drive bay" bootable with CDROM or LS120? It comes up with the same package as the hdd - so I don't know today. If yes, it's very easy to clone the hdd with my secound hdd-adapter.

Uwe.

I suspect the limit just applies to the partitions. u.mac can let us know when he tries this out. Thanks for all of your help everyone.

If the machine can use the large drive at all, the limit would be for the boot partition. The BIOS has to boot the machine, and if it can't see the whole partition, there are files that might be beyond its grasp.

And while you might get lucky with a larger partition, some of those files could move (after a software update), and you'd be stuck.

But 120GB for a boot partition isn't too tiny, even for Windows. :)

(I use Linux mostly, and typically have a 100 to 200MB boot partition.)

Samsung HM160HC runs with 159.966.781.789 bytes free in one partition - with lates BIOS in 600x.

The 600x is great

Great, thanks for the replies everyone, I will let you know when I get it all set up.