Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Under this standard terminology, a megabyte would be 1,000,000 bytes, whereas a mebi-
byte 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
http://physics.nist.gov/
BIOS Limitations
Motherboard ROM BIOSs have been updated throughout the years to support larger and
largerdrives.
Table7.14
showsthemostimportantrelativedateswhendrivecapacitylim-
its were changed.
Table 7.14 Dates of Changes to Drive Capacity Limitations in the ROM BIOS
These are when the limits were broken, such that BIOSs older than August 1994 are gen-
erally limited to drives of up to 528MB, whereas BIOSs older than January 1998 are gen-
erally limited to 8.4GB. Most BIOSs dated 1998 or newer support drives up to 137GB,
andthosedatedSeptember2002ornewershouldsupportdriveslargerthan137GB.These
areonlygeneralguidelines,though;toaccuratelydeterminethisforaspecificsystem,you
should check with your motherboard manufacturer. You can also use the System Inform-
