Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
December 1998 the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) approved as an international
standard the prefix names and symbols for binary multiples used in data processing and transmission.
Some of these prefixes are shown in
Table 7.13
.
Table 7.13. Standard Prefix Names and Symbols for Decimal and Binary Multiples
Under this standard terminology, a megabyte would be 1,000,000 bytes, whereas a mebibyte would
be 1,048,576 bytes.
Note
For more information on these industry-standard decimal and binary prefixes, check out the
National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) website at
BIOS Limitations
Motherboard ROM BIOSs have been updated throughout the years to support larger and larger drives.
Table 7.14
shows the most important relative dates when drive capacity limits were changed.
Table 7.14. Dates of Changes to Drive Capacity Limitations in the ROM BIOS
These dates are when the limits were broken, such that BIOSs older than August 1994 are generally
limited to drives of up to 528MB, whereas BIOSs older than January 1998 are generally limited to
8.4GB. Most BIOSs dated 1998 or newer support drives up to 137GB, and those dated September
2002 or newer should support drives larger than 137GB. These are only general guidelines, though;
to accurately determine this for a specific system, you should check with your motherboard
manufacturer. You can also use the System Information for Windows (SIW) utility from
http://gtopala.com/
,
which tells you the BIOS date from your system and specifically whether your
system supports the Enhanced Disk Drive specification (which means drives over 8.4GB).
