What do I need to do to use a drive larger than 128GB in my older Power Macintosh System? Why won it work with these newer, larger hard drives?
Why drives larger than 128GB aren’t recognized by older systems: In recent years, hard drives utilized the ATA-5 technology, using 24 bit addressing to format the drive. 24 bit addressing did not permit the use of drives larger than 137 GBs, (128 GBs when formatted). When drive technology evolved to allow drives to be larger than 137 GBs, drive manufacturers were forced to move to 48 bit addressing in conjunction with the new ATA-6 technology. Because the controller chip of computers, or ATA controller cards that were designed before the ATA-6 technology was finalized, they do not understand 48 bit addressing, and they will report any drive over 137 GBs as having a formatted capacity of 128 GBs. How to make your older system work with these new, large capacity drives: You can use software to allow the use of these larger drives, but the preferred (and OWC recommended) method is to use hardware. The software is Intech Hard Disk SpeedTools, and they have an excellent information page on
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