Is there really a hard drive capacity limit?

S

surfbunny2000

New Member
Hi, im in the process of buying a 500gb hard drive for a dell dimension E310 and i been trying to assess if im going to have any probs in doing this. From the reviews it says it has 160gb capacity and uses RAID 0 to mirror drives, so my questions are is this true and if not whats the way around this? I know this is prolly silly but i dont want to go buy something than have to turn right around and return it....thanks
 
I couldn't imagine a computer that age being limited to only a 160G HD... Are you sure the reviews weren't just complaining that a 160G was the largest you could order with the machine?
 
I think the motherboard in that pc cant use HDD's bigger than 160Gb by the sound of it. there is no way around that as far as i know.. so i dont think you can go over 160Gb for that pc (I'm not 100% sure tough,. so dont take my word for it :o )


edit: i think The other one's right.. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1918110,00.asp

by reading that full review,.. you the pc comes standard with a 160Gb HDD.. and you can add another one for RAID1 (Mirroring) so you wont loose your data if 1 drive fails,.. you dont have to set them in raid1 tough,.. so i think you can add a bigger drive to it without a problem.
 
The only reason that you couldn't put a big hard drive in is if you had an operating system earlier than Windows XP. They were limited to 132GB, I believe.

You have Windows XP, so you should be fine with a 500GB hard drive :)
 
Jet said:
You have Windows XP, so you should be fine with a 500GB hard drive :)
Click to expand...

Some motherboards also have a maximum HD capacity they can support, no? But thats a 2006 pc.. i dont think that would be limited to 160Gb.. (now that i think about it, my old MSI K7T Turbo LE was limited to 160Gb... and thats a 2001 board iirc)
 
I'm quite sure that computer came with XP SP2, considering it's age. And as I said, I can't imagine the hardware not supporting a larger drive.

Back in the day, when computers were limited to 504M drives :P You could do something with a "Bios Extension" that would allow the computer to use larger drives. I'm pretty sure there's nothing like this around anymore, but I've really not looked...
 
As TOO said, as long as you have XP SP2 it should work fine. If it doesn't you should be able to split the hard drive up into separate 160GB partitions.
 
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