The Whole Drive Guide

Advice for the gigabyte-addicted: How to upgrade to today's best and biggest--or keep your current hard disks running smoothly.

Lab Notes: Big Drives May Beget Big Problems

Initially, Hitachi's 180GB Deskstar 180GXP drive would not run on our Windows XP Pro-equipped Dell Dimension 8200 test system, although the same PC had no difficulty with Maxtor drives up to 300GB. The problem, we learned, stemmed from differences in how companies implement the new 48-bit addressing standard for recognizing drives over 137.4GB; we solved it by updating Intel's Application Accelerator driver to a version that jibed with Hitachi's implementation. Depending on your setup, drives over 137.4GB may work flawlessly or they may require you to update drivers, the BIOS, the operating system, or all three. And you may still have problems with older motherboard chip sets.

Microsoft provides a starting point with fixes for Windows XP (" How to Enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing Support for ATAPI Disk Drives in Windows XP") and 2000 (" 48-bit LBA Support for ATAPI Disk Drives in Windows 2000"). And fixes for other versions of Windows may be possible with updates to the system BIOS and the driver for the ATA controller.

You can also get around the problem by installing an expansion card (with its own drivers), such as the Promise Technology Ultra100 TX2 ATA/100 PCI IDE card, which sells for about $30 and comes bundled with Western Digital retail kits for drives over 137.4GB. With such a card, you need not upgrade your BIOS or your operating system.

--Sean Captain and Elliott Kirschling