Large disk drive on VIA EPIA 5000 mainboard / VT-8231 controller

Wayne Sierke ws+fbsd at au.dyndns.ws
Wed Dec 15 21:34:36 PST 2004


Hi,

I've attached a WD1600JB 160G WDC drive to my EPIA 5000 board. As
expected the BIOS would only recognise 137G but FreeBSD 5.3 is happily
(AFAICT) using the whole drive. As a test I've filled up the drive and
so far there's no sign of any problems, but verifying a drive's worth of
data is taking some time.

Would anyone happen to know whether there are any caveats with this
combination? I was surprised that it worked because I thought I'd read
something from VIA claiming that the IDE controller on these boards
isn't lba-48 capable. Does FreeBSD automagically account for proper
combination of the drive and controller capabilities, or is it merely
seeing an lba-48 drive and assuming that I'm smart enough not to attach
hardware that's not compatible?


Thanks,

Wayne




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