Big Drive spec breaks 137GB limit

[Keefe]

ATA drives, better known as IDE, are present in nearly every consumer-level desktop computer on the market today.   While SCSI (ATAs primary competitor) was reasonably common a decade ago on desktop PCs, it has slowly been relegated to high-end workstations and servers as the performance of the IDE interface has increased and its drain on CPU resources had decreased.  The most recent drive limitation, preventing access to drives larger than 137GB, has been resolved.   In an announcement last week, the ANSI NCITS T13 Technical Committee (also known as the ANSI ATA committee) announced it had adopted a version of Maxtor’s ATA/ATAPI-6 proposal, now dubbed “big drive” which extends the 137GB limit to more than 144PB.   That’s 144 petabytes or 144,000 terabytes!  Read the full article here