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Technology (Apple) Businesses Apple Technology

Apple IDE Cannot Access Beyond 137GB 112

Posted by pudge from the hard-drives-for-dummies dept.
An anonymous reader writes: "iMacLinux reported on a PenguinPPC story about Apple hardware being unable to address more than 137GB of space on IDE drives. The Apple computers only have ATA-66, which can only address 28 bits, while ATA-100/133 can address 48 bits. Solutions include using a PCI controller, FireWire or SCSI."
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Apple IDE Cannot Access Beyond 137GB More

Apple IDE Cannot Access Beyond 137GB

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  • Don't PC's use ATA66 and ATA100 as well?

  • Kings to Paupers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dtype ( 98103 ) on Thursday February 21, 2002 @09:03PM (#3048681) Homepage
    Sadly, this is an area where Apple really has dropped the ball. It used to be that machines came with SCSI drives and interfaces, in a technology push similar to the USB push of a few years ago, and the current Firewire bonanza.

    Now, while Apple's FireWire support is certainly commendable, lack of USB 2.0 (in a slight war with Intel in competition with Firewire) and the inferior hard drives that ship with even the best machines is lackluster at best.

    It is time to let Apple know that drive performance is just as high on our list as such cool things as 1394. I can't plug my DV camcorder up to it (which certainly does reduce marketing value), but a fast IDE bus is still extremely important.

    If you're in the mac market, or own one now, make sure to let Apple sales know what you think.

    • Re:Kings to Paupers (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The current ATA/66 IDE speed on the Mac is still faster than the fastest IDE drives made. None of todays fastest IDE drives go much over 40MB/sec. A 100MB interface will gain you nothing.

      Even if Apple releases 800 Mbits/sec FireWire, the drives still won't go any faster. The ultimate bottleneck is the drives themselves. The fastest drives have a maximum sustained transfer rate of about 41MB/sec. That doesn't come close to the 50MB/sec theoretical rate of FireWire or the 66MB/sec theoretical rate of ATA/66.

      • Re:Kings to Paupers (Score:3, Informative)

        by dtype ( 98103 )
        You're somewhat right.

        (1) The ATA/100 would still gain you the larger address space, allowing larger capacities. Since
        160GB drives are here (and a scant us$250 to boot), this is quite important.

        (2) I agree that the faster bus in theory won't get you more performance with a _single_ drive. But the fact is, that benchmarks say otherwise. For whatever reason, the faster burst speed of the bus has slightly improved the overall speed. I'm not a particularly good hardware engineer, but when I run `hdparm` on a couple of drives, I like the faster speed regardless of reason... (I still hate IDE and would much prefer SCSI, but I can't get a 160GB SCSI drive for $250.)

        (3) ATA/100 controllers are dirt cheap. I can't believe that the extra few bucks wouldn't be worth it in marketing value alone.

        • Marketing value?

          Exactly what planet are you on where Apple markets to people who give a damn one way or the other whether they have an ATA/100 instead of an ATA/66 hard drive.

          Apple I'm sure mind geeks buying their machines, and they've made a few overtures, but Apple, and Jobs in particular, wants people on it's terms. If those terms don't appeal to you, smile brightly and wave and wish you good luck with whatever else you use.

          And adding cost to a machine is the last thing Apple wants to do with everyone screaming 'till kingdom come about how Apple's hardware is overpriced, etc. Whatever margin Apple has, those few bucks per machine that Apple would pay for an ATA/100 controller would not be absorbed by that margin, and the "overpriced" hardware would only increased in cost for the end consumer. I'm sure there's a shitload of little improvements that could be made to the hardware, but it adds up, and you've got to draw the line somewhere.

          And if you want SCSI, you can special order your G4 with SCSI drives. Yeah, it costs, but SCSI costs as you yourself admit. The normal everyday user that buys a Mac for the home does not need SCSI. I don't care how fast it is. They just don't need it. Office workers don't need SCSI. They just don't need it. The speed doesn't matter for what they do. Hence, the cheaper machines use a cheaper alternative.
    • " Sadly, this is an area where Apple really has dropped the ball. It used to be ... "

      that was my exact first thought. first the airport, then the ipod, and now this.
      granted, 137GB is a lot of space, but give me a weekend with my girlfriend in bed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H at the lake, and i could fill that up in a relatively short time.

      most mac users are creative by trade in some way or another, and those folks seem to find creative ways to use drive space.

      on the other side of the market, the fact that there ARE competitors is a huge benefit in a case like this. chances are the others guys stuff doesnt have the same issue, and if it does, thats that many more orginizations rushing to fix it to be first on the market.

      people buy macs because they believe they are superior, and stuff like this makes it much harder to believe.

    • Well, i just talked to the graphics pros i know, and the video pros, and the journalism odd balls and they all had the same feeling about this artical: So what?! Ok, anyone who is going to need that much with their high-end box are going to get a SCSI card and just bypass the whole ordeal. No person in their right mind would rely upon an IDE drive to do their work on. Just wont happen. Now, getting up into 80g is beginning to get normal for mac users, i have noticed, so they will be upgrading to the 100 form soon. this was for the consumer, this choice was. Much cheeper to buy ATA vs. SCSI drives for large capacity. (MAN! i do wish i could use that random firewire port on the motherboard...)

    • Re:Kings to Paupers (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Personally, I love ATA drives. Really. Even doing digital multitrack I/O I don't want or need SCSI.
      Apple offers IDE as the default because it works well and inexpensively. If you want SCSI, you can order Ultra 160 drives in your PowerMac direct from Apple. They give you an option, so take it. I instead ordered an ATA RAID card and have never hard a problem with drive performance. Imagine if Apple started putting SCSI drives in their iMacs - nicer drives and they also had to raise the price tag by $300. Doesn't really sound like a smart move for a consumer oriented product, does it?
  • My understanding was that there is no such thing as a 'native firewire' hard drive. All the Firewire drives I know of use ATA mechanisms inside. Some have the Oxford 911 bridge chipset which seems to improve transfer speed quite a bit (over the non-Oxford bridge drives.)

    Is there such a thing as a 'native firewire' drive?

    Can having an ATA controller in a firewire case make it possible to get around the motherboard limitations?
    • I think that is correct, but it doesn't mean that someone couldn't make a firewire-native HD. You would just have to put a different controller board on it. It would be more expensive than an IDE drive, just because the controller would have to be "smarter".

      I seem to recall that when firewire was being develped (some time before it actually debuted on the B&W powermacs), there was talk about an internal version of firewire that would have a significanly faster transfer rate. Unfortunately, it doesn't ever seem to have come about.

      • I think that is correct, but it doesn't mean that someone couldn't make a firewire-native HD. You would just have to put a different controller board on it. It would be more expensive than an IDE drive, just because the controller would have to be "smarter".

        Yep, that's right. Firewire is a lot like SCSI in the way it works (main differences are larger address size, more flexible topology, and serial instead of parallel) so the complexity (and hence the price, ignoring the effects of supply/demand) would probably be similar to SCSI. More expensive than ATA because the board has to be "smarter" like SCSI.

    • Correct. AFAIK (and I think I'm up to date on this), there are no 'native' firewire drives. The firewire drives just include IDE logic and present a firewire interface. This is why they cost $100 or so for the enclosure alone. A simple external drive enclosure/power supply would cost much less.

      A 160GB firewire drive may allow full capacity because the IDE logic (necessarily ATA-100+) is inside the drive enclosure, and the IDE addressing is done there. The Firewire storage/drive spec just has to support the larger sizes, and it does.

    • Re:Firewire? (Score:3, Informative)

      by achbed ( 97139 )
      Is there such a thing as a 'native firewire' drive?
      Can having an ATA controller in a firewire case make it possible to get around the motherboard limitations?

      1) Yes, it is possible to have a "native" firewire drive. However, since nobody but apple has an internal firewire port, no drive manufacturer is going to make one. They'll stick with bridge chipsets and cheap IDE disks.
      2) Yes, a FireWire bridge is the second best method to get around chipset limitations. The best is to use a PCI expansion card, as the PCI bus is (currently) faster than FireWire in terms of transfer speeds.

  • Waiting for SerialATA (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ChadN ( 21033 ) on Thursday February 21, 2002 @09:45PM (#3048854)
    I assume Apple (like myself) is waiting for deployment of serial ATA technology; this will get around the current size restrictions as well as offer other improvements. I had hoped it would be available by now, but it seems it will be another year or so before it is even targeted for high end consumer level products.

    • While that thought did cross my mind, I doubt it. SerialATA has a long ways to go before it becomes standard. My guess is that for then next eight years(I don't expect to see SerialATA for at least another year) we'll have IDE and SerialATA on the same motherboard(How many years did it take to kill ISA?). My guess is that Apple will upgrade to ATA133 when they upgrade to DDR-SDRAM.
  • I mean, if you're going to address that much hard drive space, wouldn't you use SCSI anyway?

    Apple's online store shows the dual 1 GHz systems with 2x80 GB ATA drives, but with an option to do 3x72 GB Ultra 160 SCSI drives. Then, of course there's always FireWire.
  • Why do apple drives say they have special Apple IDE firmware on them? If this is true how can it also be true that any random IDE disk will even work in an Apple? Perhaps I am confused and should dismantle my iMac :).

    Dave

    • Re:explain this: (Score:2, Informative)

      by MarcQuadra ( 129430 )
      Macs do things a bit differently than PCs. A PC hard drive will work fine in a mac (I have my G3 here running a new Maxtor D740X), but you have to 'prep' them first, because Macs put patches + low-level stuff on the drive itself. If you throw a PC orphaned drive into a mac, run Drive Setup on it and totally wipe it, or use 'dd bs=512 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/harddriveyouwantwiped' if you do Linux on your mac. Be careful with 'dd' it's far too powerful to toy with.

      • Re:explain this: (Score:1, Offtopic)

        by Hadlock ( 143607 )
        i know this is a strech, but i have a mac LC II (OLD 68k system, 16 mhz, 10 mb ram) with the original 40 mb hard drive. how might one go about making a 1 gb scsi hd work in the mac? (LC II's apparently can support up to 4 gb drives, so size isn't the problem, and the scsi drive came out of my friend's old counterstrike server) i ran apple's hard drive detection/formatting software, but it refused to recognize a new drive. any thoughts?
        • your best course of action is to:
          identify the drive model and manufacturer
          consult the manufacturers website
          set the appropriate jumpers
          sacrifice a small goat to scsi gods

        • The reason it didn't see the drive is because Apple crippled HD Setup so it only works on Apple drives. There is a patch floating around that will make it work with any drive (check net/openBSD's site) or you could use a third party formatter.

          • It's not really a patch, just use ResEdit to change the wfwr resource.

            (It's either a change from 00 to FF or FF to 00, I don't remember which. In any case, you can't miss it. The wfwr resource should only be 2 bytes.)

            • I haven't used it in a long while but I thought there was a semi-idiot proofed, point and click patch floating around to do it for the ResEdit challenged.

      • Actually, as I recall, they don't add "patches + low-level stuff" to the drive anymore than PCs do. They have an apple driver and the partition table. That's it. Apple IDE drives may have Apple stickers on them, but that's just an OEM thing. You'll find that an IDE drive from a PC works in a Mac, and a Mac drive works in a PC. In the old days, when everything was still SCSI on the Macs, there were Apple Firmware'd drives. Apple used this to control which drives could be formatted by their utilities. Not a problem currently.

  • Standard hardware has limitations, over. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 ) on Thursday February 21, 2002 @11:26PM (#3049190) Homepage Journal
    "Whoa, well thank God that's over, I was worried there for a second."

    Seriously, the problem and the solution were all neatly bundled up into this story. Hey, I bet a standard Mac can only use 4 IDE devices before you have to add another hard drive controller. *Gasp*. I assume people who need more devices add appropriate upgrades.

  • By the way, I'm don't think it's necessarily correct to say the Apple hardware doesn't support ATA/100 and therefore doesn't support large disks. It seems the article and some of the posts here are confusing speed with large capacity capability. You can still do 48bit LBA in PIO mode if you want. Just this week I stuck a 160BG drive in an ancient Pentium 100 computer--and I used the whole disk (why you ask? It was for a backup server--large disk, extra cheap computer sitting around). There's no way the on-board IDE chip could have been ata/100 compliant. However, linux plus the ATA patch I installed supported the 48 Bit LBA commands from the ATA-6 spec, so I was able to use the whole disk. In PIO mode too. :-)

    I mention this because it's quite possible that the solution to this problem is a little software update from Apple. You computer may not be obsolete yet. :)

  • Why is this an apple story? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Lally Singh ( 3427 ) on Friday February 22, 2002 @12:00AM (#3049306) Journal
    This sounds like an ATA/66 issue, not an Apple issue. What's the deal with all this spin?
    • May PCs ship with ATA/100 or 133 these days. Apple is getting some techno-flak for "still" using ATA/66 in its machines. It's not the technology, it's the decision to keep it.

      But I don't care. I threw a 160GB drive in an external FireWire case and it worked like a charm so it doesn't bother me (ok, I'll grant my reason for this was the two 80GB drives in the computer, but still....). =)
  • I have PC 133 in my Mac now. Oh yes, they have this wonderful card (yes I know you'd have to pay for it) called the Acard 6880-M [acard.com]. It ran me about 159 for the card and I bought 2 ata133 Maxtors and lemme tell you... these things are fast. I get about 160 throughput in benchmarks. Its a hardware based raid card, so it works in OS 9 and OS X perfectly. I only wish they'd fix the rom so it would sleep and spin down the disks. I have 220 gig across 4 drives and its pretty sweet. Even if they move to 133, I'd still move this card over for the RAID aspects.
  • Apple's standard configs ship with ATA/66 controllers. This is enough to get the fastest sustained transfer rate of any IDE drive on the market. The only real advantage ATA 133 has over 66 and 100 is that it can accomodate drives larger than 130GB. Last I checked, there are hardly any drives available of that size. The Maxtor 160 is probably the most popular, but the slow 5200RPM speed makes it almost worthless. If you really must have a 133 controller, just buy one - they're pretty much free these days anyway.

  • Apple > ATA-66 (Score:2, Informative)

    by coolgeek ( 140561 )
    New G4's have Ultra ATA-100, at least according to the guys at my local "Genius Bar". I know the specs on apple.com simply say "Ultra-ATA", that's why I asked. Planning on getting me one of those 933 pups here in a month or so... And for all the "Apple is slow" guys out here, my 667 TiBook running OS X totally runs circles around my old P-III/600 running either Linux or Win2K, and it's a lot easier to look at too.
    • The genius is wrong. According to the new technote on the new G4s, it supports only ATA-66

      "The KeyLargo IC implements a single Ultra DMA/66 hard disk interface. This interface supports the boot drive and can accommodate a second hard drive."

      http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/hardware/Dev el oper_Notes/Macintosh_CPUs-G4/PowerMacG4/2Architect ure/KeyLargo_I_O_Controller.html

      The only differences between the previous (pre 1GHz) G4 and the new ones is the graphics card, higher bundled RAM and new G4 processor.

      http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/hardware/Dev el oper_Notes/Macintosh_CPUs-G4/PowerMacG4/1Introduct ion/New_Features.html

      David
    • And for all the "Apple is slow" guys out here, my 667 TiBook running OS X totally runs circles around my old P-III/600 running either Linux or Win2K, and it's a lot easier to look at too.

      I wish I could say the same. I'm typing this from my new iBook (600Mhz Combo drive). I was once part of the 'Apple is fast' crowd. but after using it for 3 days, and I've gone to the 'Apple is slow' crowd. Well, atleast for all the G3 macs.

      I think I'll pulug in a 256MB stick and make my final desicion then. It's currently 128MB. And I've heard alot of people say that it's not enough. I think they are right.
      The question is how much faster it will run after the RAM injection.

      Hmmmm..... Back on topic again. I've always found that Apple are a bit slow when compared to the lastest PC standards, and it's quite annoying sometimes. But then, they are usaly ahead in other areas--like FireWire and USB for example.

      • If you're talking about adding 256MB to the 128MB, that should improve things a lot, at least with OS X. The system is definitely paging out with 128MB. I suggest 384MB or 512MB, because 256MB is a little slim, even when using the nifty window compression for OS X [ambrosiasw.com], IIRC, you get about 50MB free with window compression turned on w/256MB. @512MB, my TiBook hardly ever pages out.
  • I guess I just be ahead of the curve or something, but the title of this article is a total "DUH!" for me. The new 48 bit addressing scheme has not even "set" yet. There is a DAMN good reason many large capacity ATA drives come wtih a FREE ATA 133 card. Until everything is nailed down on this standard, get a card/drive bundle, or at least make sure your ATA card is certified by the drive manufacturer.

    I'm perfectly happy to use one of my more-or-less-useless PCI slots for one of these cards. They just gather dust anyways. :-)
  • just by an ACARD ATA133 PCI Controller wich will bring you full size-compatibility up to all big drives :-) It even works under mac os x ! Martin (playmax.de)
    • Except... NOT.

      I have 3 160GB drives, G4/800DP and OSX and the acard card... the drives are stuck in 128GB land...

      Any suggestions?
  • Slightly offtopic, but didn't think of a better place to ask.
    What about Sun's IDE on Blade 100, Netra X1?
    Would be nice to have one of those for compatibility testing, was just wondering if they're any good otherwise.
  • Everyone knows that 10MB of storage is more then enough space. 136 GB? That's enough storage for 3600 friends... Nobody has THAT many friends... except for maybe Zorro.
    • WHAT!!! 10 mb? You obviously don't work with any sort of graphics or multimedia. Some of my files are almost 2 gb in size. Photoshopfile routinely start at 600mb and get quickly pushed over the 1 gig mark with layers, that's pretty normal. And if you work in video things get even bigger faster.

      10 mb might be good for standard home use, but in the design world it doesn't even come close

  • I'm getting tired of IDE garbage (let's face it, it's been suffering incremental now-it-sucks-less improvements for ten years). It's slow, buggy, and annoying. My question is, when will we see internal firewire drives?

    Drives can be powered by the firewire bus, if necessarily (but why bother unless their usage is low, like zip drives), the cables are much easier to manage than ribbon cables and make getting around inside far easier (Apple has solved this in their G4 cases, but most haven't).

    It's also 400 megabits (at the moment), is DMA (needs it for guaranteed bandwidth, for cameras and so on), inherantly needs no drivers, and so on. I've also seen PCI Firewire cards that have internal connectors (three external USB2, two external Firewire, and one each internal), so when will we start seeing the drives?

    --Dan
    • 400Mbps is slower than ATA/66; it's going to be much slower than Serial ATA. Because Firewire is so much more advanced than ATA, it also costs more. I'm not interested in internal Firewire drives.
      • Perhaps it is slower, but it's certainly fast enough for me, and I'll trade speed for ease of use, reliability, 500+ devices on a single chain, the ability to go up to several gigabits per second (according to the spec, i.e. 'firewire 2.0 or whatever'), and so on. IDE is nothing but a pain, and you don't need performance like that in a desktop machine.

        Perhaps it's not for everyone, but me, I'd like the opportunity to make that choice. Even if it's just for adding other internal devices, like CD-ROM/CD-RW drives, zip drives, disk drives, etc., and leave the main drive IDE, I think it would be a great help. Most devices don't even need 400 megabits, let alone anything ATA/133 can offer, so why waste device space? It's just silly, and the cables are much nicer anyway.

        --Dan

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