200GB HD for $80 at Compusa Online

[High_Jumbllama]

$160 - 20(Instant) - $60(Mail in)

[Lizzard[MPE]]

jesus h christ. i bought the 120 gig last year for $100 (50 mail in) and still havent used it and now youre tellin me about this?

sigh.. im not allowed in compusa here anyway.

[KvHagedorn]

That's ok.. NTFS crashes and destroys your file system if it goes over 130GB anyhow.

[High_Jumbllama]

? I have a 160GB drive at the moment running NTFS on XP SP2.

[agallag]

Me too. I also have single partitions of nearly a TB at work with NTFS, no problem at all.

[Dr Mordrid]

600g RAID5 here and no NTFS problems.

Dr. Mordrid

[KvHagedorn]

I had a 160gb and a 200gb drive go bonkers when they reached this limit. I also had a friend whose drive did the same thing. He said he had to download some obscure patch from microsoft to fix it, but i couldn't find the specific patch. This happened to me with w2ksp4. Installed windows update so maybe things will work this time.

Doc, from what I have heard RAIDs don't have the problem for some reason. What are you using for an array? SCSI drives I presume.. with an LSI controller card?

[KvHagedorn]

.. and the problem supposedly only manifests itself when you put over 130gb of DATA on the drive. This is especially handy when your file system trashes all that massive amount of data.

[agallag]

Well I've had my 160GB drive on my machine at home (XP) down to less than 10GB free a few times. No problem at all.

[KvHagedorn]

Well, I'm about to do a mirrored raid with a pair of serial ata 200gb Seagates, so when I get it set up I will fill the raid to the brim with many copies of stuff just to test and see what will happen. Main drive with OS on it is now an 80gb which will have just my installed programs and games on it. All data will go on the raid (and I need to be able to trust it.. starting to get very paranoid about this)

[Dr Mordrid]

Originally posted by KvHagedorn
Doc, from what I have heard RAIDs don't have the problem for some reason. What are you using for an array? SCSI drives I presume.. with an LSI controller card?

Look at my SIG: Promise SX4000 RAID5 controller w/4 200g HDD's. This nets out to 600g of storage and 200g of distributed parity data.

Dr. Mordrid

[Jammrock]

Originally posted by KvHagedorn
That's ok.. NTFS crashes and destroys your file system if it goes over 130GB anyhow.

Considering NTFS was developed for servers and workstations, I certainly hope it doesn't. We have hundreds of NTFS volumes over 130 GB and no problems here at work ... at least with NTFS v5 that comes with Win2k/XP/2k3 and WinNT 4.0 SP4.

[dZeus]

Originally posted by KvHagedorn
That's ok.. NTFS crashes and destroys your file system if it goes over 130GB anyhow.

What you experienced most likely is attaching a >138GB drive to a controller which doesn't support 48-bit LBA. The behaviour you describes is identical to what happens in that situations.

NTFS has nothing to do with that problem. It's a user error (not checking compatiblity prior to connecting the drive).

[KvHagedorn]

No, this is a different problem. If 48bit LBA was not supported nor enabled, the drive would only have been detected as a 138gb drive. It was detected as a 200gb and worked fine until 130+ gb of data was written to it.

[agallag]

Could've just been bad drives. My first Maxtor 160GB drive crapped out completely once it got to about 100GB full. The replacement has been fine, even when nearly full.