OT: External firewire hard drive question

Chris H wrote on 5/18/2004, 6:04 AM

I am planning to purchase an firewire external hard drive. This drive will only be used for storage and as a backup for projects. I have a couple of questions.
1. Do I need to format this drive? if so, what is the process to format a new drive?
2. If the drive is an external hard drive, will my BIOS limit how much of the drive I can access? Right now my computer (Dell 8200 P4 1.8 GZ) only recognizes 136 GB of my second internal hard drive.

Thanks for your help.

Chris

Comments

riredale wrote on 5/18/2004, 9:09 AM

(1) Instructions should come with the unit that descsribe how to partition and format your external drive.

(2) For an internal drive, the BIOS must be capable of dealing with a >137GB drive. In addition, you need winXPsp1 to recognize the drive, or an older OS can do it if you put some "overlay" software on the drive. An alternative is to buy a card that goes in one of the PCI slots on your motherboard, and then plug the drive into that card. The card has its own BIOS and can handle the large drive directly.

(3) For an external drive, check to see if the interface circuitry inside the box can handle large drives--the older ones can't (my ADS Pyro API-800, for instance). It's my understanding that the PC BIOS and OS have nothing to do with external drive capacity utilization, though I would assume that system tools such as scandisk would not report the size properly.

Somebody else, please chime in if I have any of this wrong.