600SC Hard Drives

This will work, if you're using that big of a drive, obviously you'll be storing a lot on it.  Use it as a volume of it's own though, don't go installing the O/S on that puppy.  Keep it strictly data! 

The only thing is that the 600SC only supports ATA/100 so keep that in mind (but I wouldn't worry about it).

Did you get a 250gb disk working in a 600sc?

 

I phoned the dell support line to ask about this and all they could tell me was that it was certified for 120gb disks from dell. That wasn't helpful, i could have read that in the brochure.

 

The whole 137/128gb lba-48 issue is rather puzzling to me.

 

Be careful with any hard drives over 120GB capacity. Although they are backwards compatible with ATA-100/66/33, because of the inherent design limitation, the ATA-100 disk controllers can not "see" anything above 120GB limit. The least troublesome scenario--your 160GB hard drive will be identified as 120GB and downgrade its interface to ATA-100; the worst scenario--it will malfunction. Therefore, recommendation: use ATA-100 drives on ATA-100 controllers.

You can still use larger capacity ATA-133 drives in the 600SC with a separate controller board (usually included with the hard drive). Just make sure the PCI controller board works at 3v.

Hope this helps.

So to use a seperate controller board, all the hard drives would be interfaced through this PCI card as per normal (2 controllers w/ 2 drives on each).  When you do this, does the system just ignore the controllers on the m/b or does it just over ride the configuration once it detects the PCI controller board? (are you able to connect anything to the controllers on the board at all when a seperate controller board is installed?)

Is there a know max. hard drive size barrier on the ATA 133 drives, or is it just known that it breaks the 137GB barrier?

Thanks in advance for your info.

The barrier is based on BIOS and Windows. It applies to IDE drives. It does not apply to
SCSI Raid nor IDE Raid.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305098/EN-US/

 

I run two Maxtor 300gb drives, a seagate 120 gb and western digital 120gb under Fedora linux and it works fine.

Dell support provided no useful information on this subject.

Seagate have some good documents that discuss this topic:

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/faq/137_overview.html