motherboard supports hd

[paladin_yang]

I have a old motherboard. Its chipset is i440zx.
I don't know if it is able to support 80G hard drive.

Expecting answer...

 

[RichPLS]

Yes, I believe so.

_____________________________________________
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[Crashman]

i440zx is based on the 440BX but with a couple minor modifications: It can only support something like 4 banks of RAM and 3 busmastering devices. For most users it's a fine chipset and has no functional differences from the BX in most configurations.

There isn't any limit to the size any chipset supports, but various BIOS releases support various drive sizes. If your BIOS is very old (which I suspect it is), it probably doesn't support anything larger than 37GB. Newer BIOS supports up to 128GB.

If you gave us a model number of the board, or the BIOS string so we can look up the model number, we can be more helpfull in determining where to find a newer BIOS version. Some boards that were not updated by their manufacturers have been updated by usergroups that specialize in modifying BIOS.

Better than a BIOS update would be to add a PCI-IDE card at ATA100 or ATA133 speed. When you add your new 80GB or larger drive, you'll probably find the old ATA33 controller is far slower than the drive, resulting in poor performance. Using an ATA100 or ATA133 card allows you to go with the maximum size allowed by CARD BIOS, rather than motherboard BIOS, along with the greater speed.

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[Crashman]

Oh, and in case you weren't interested in a verbose answer, I have to break your question into tow parts:

Does the i440zx support 80GB Drives? YES!
Will your board support 80GB Drives without updating BIOS? Probably NOT.

For solutions to the second part, re-read the LONG version of the answer.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>