Motherboard hard drive compatibility

[vincentfreeman]

I have a Gateway PIII 500Mhz computer with a 12GB hard drive. I want to upgrade to a Seagate Barracuda 120GB or larger drive but am not sure if this large drive will work with my motherboard. The specs from Sisoft Sandra are as follows:

System BIOS : Intel Corp. 4W4SB0X0.15A.0013.P08

Mainboard
Manufacturer : Intel Corporation
MP Support : No
Model : WS440BX
Version : AA744110-203

Chipset 1
Model : Intel Corporation 82443BX/ZX 440BX/ZX CPU to PCI Bridge (AGP Implemented)
Bus(es) : ISA X-Bus AGP PCI USB i2c/SMBus
Front Side Bus Speed : 1x 99MHz (99MHz data rate)
Maximum FSB Speed / Max Memory Speed : 1x 100MHz / 1x 100MHz
Width : 64-bit
IO Queue Depth : 4 request(s)

Will a large drive work straight away, or do I need to upgrade my BIOS?

Many thanks to anyone who can advise.

 

[ric449]

That is an old motherboard, with an old BIOS. Chances are you will have to upgrade the BIOS to use that big drive. But there is another setback. Does that motherboard use ATA/66? If so, that specification can only support drives up to 137GB. If you want higher than this, buy a PCI ATA controller card, or get a new motherboard.

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[vincentfreeman]

I'm not sure how to find out if it's using ATA/66. The ATA part of Sisoft Sandra gives:

General Capabilities
Channel : Master
Type : ATA
Removable : No
Model : QUANTUM FIREBALL CX13.6A
Revision : A3F.0B00
Serial Number : 934922921755
ATA/ATAPI Approved Version : 4.17
Disk Cache : Multi-Sector with Read Cache
Cache Size : 418kB (836 sectors)

Drive Geometry
Unformatted Bytes Per Sector : 21298
Unformatted Bytes Per Track : 32256
CHS Geometry : 16383 x 16 x 63
CHS Total Sectors : 16514064
LBA Total Sectors : 26760384
Number of ECC Bytes : 4
Capacity : 12.8GB

Translation Mode Geometry
CHS Geometry : 16383 x 16 x 63
CHS Total Sectors : 16514064

If it is ATA/66 I don't mind settling for a 120GB drive. I've looked through Gateway's site to find an upgrade but I'm a bit confused as to how to find a suitable bios upgrade. Should I get one instead from the Intel site? Plus how do I match a bios upgrade to my particular motherboard?

thanks,

Vincent.

 

[Crashman]

You have a BX chipset with an old BIOS. The BX only supported ATA33 speed natively. And I don't have a lot of trust in Intel's BIOS updates, which would be needed to support a large drive at that slow speed.

I'd suggest you get a bootable PCI ATA100 or ATA133 card. It will boot on your PC as a SCSI card (even though it isn't, BIOS doesn't know the difference) and allow large drives at high transfer rates.

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