minimum hardware to recognize a 500 gig drive

[Syngin]

Hey guys,

Anyone have an idea of the rough minimum requirements for a system to recognize a 500 gig drive? Think most P4s would be up for the job?

I'm putting together a couple of faubackup machines from spare parts but they'll need to be able to recognize the large drives.

Also, could older systems recognize the drive if I brought their bios up to date?

Thanks.

[ph34r]

I have a few old P2's with 1tb drives in them...

[Syngin]

Seriously? Thats handy to know.

I was lucky enough to find a 2.4 ghz system with half a gig of RAM buried in a scrap hardware closet so I'm good to go for at least one system now.

One think I forgot to mention was that the 500 gig drives are SATA. Are you using PCI SATA cards in the PIIs or straight IDE? (Do they even make 500 gig IDE drives?)

[ph34r]

One of 'em has a massive (300gb IIRC) IDE drive in it on the mobo controller, have 2 more P2's set up as file servers using a 80gb drive and DVD burner on the mobo IDE controllers and 4 1tb drives as a software raid-5 array on a PCI SATA II controller card.

Don't forget that you can specify cylinder/heads/sectors on the kernel boot line if the bios doesn't support the drive directly...

[blackbelt_jones]

Seriously, you should have no problem. If there's a lower limit, it's way lower than that. I had a 300 GB IDE hard drive running on a Pentium 3 and GET THIS:

Just last week I bought an old laptop for 75 dollars, which I intend to run mostly text. It's a Pentium 2 with 96MB RAM. I installed Vector Linux Light on it, anything else makes it run way too slow. HOWEVER, it recognizes my 500 GB external MY BOOK hard drives without any problem. I haven't gotten the sound card working yet, but I've actually run .avi video files silently off the hard drive with mplayer. So there ya go!