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Breaking the 137GB Storage Barrier
Past barriers often frustrated people trying to add a new hard disk to an older system
when they discovered that not all of the designed capacity of the hard disk was
accessible. This inability to access the entire drive is referred to as a "capacity
barrier" and it has been seen and overcome many times in the computer and disk drive
industry.
The 137-gigabyte barrier is the result of the original design specification for the ATA
interface that provided only 28 bits of address for data. This specification means a
hard disk can have a maximum of 268,435,456 sectors of 512 bytes of data which
puts the ATA interface maximum at 137.4 gigabytes.
10,000,000
1,000,000
100,000
10,000
1,000
DOS
5.x
4.x
100
3.x
10
1980
10 megabytes:early
16 megabytes:
32 megabytes:
128 megabytes:
528 megabytes:
2.1 gigabytes:
4.2 gigabytes:
8.4 gigabytes:
32 gigabytes:
A-2
Maxtor MaXLine Plus II 250GB AT
Win95A
Win 3.x
128MB
32MB
16MB
10MB
1985
1990
PC/XT limit
FAT 12 limit
DOS 3.x limit
DOS 4.x limit
Early ATA BIOSs without BIOS extensions
DOS file system partition limit
CMOS extended CHS addressing limit (not widely experienced)
BIOS/Int13 24-bit addressing limit
BIOS limit
137GB
Win2000
WinME
33GB
Win98
Win95(osr2)
8GB
4GB
2GB
528MB
1995
2000
WinXP
2005
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