Hi All,

We are looking at using some Maxtor 160GB IDE drives under NetBSD 1.5.1, and
realise there is a change when drives get bigger than 137GB:

>>The 137-gigabyte barrier is the result of the original design
specification for the ATA interface that provided only 28
>>bits of address for data. This specification means a hard disk can have a
maximum of 268,435,456 sectors of 512 bytes of
>>data which puts the ATA interface maximum at 137.4 gigabytes.

>>As described earlier, the issue causing the 137-gigabyte barrier is the
28-bit addressing method of the original ATA
>>specification. A change to expand this method was required to provide more
address bits for the interface, allowing
>>significant growth for many years to come. A critical issue in expanding
the addressing capability was maintaining
>>compatibility with the existing installed base of products.

>>A new ATA standard, ATA/ATAPI-6, has been in the works for some time, and
the latest draft of this standard resolves this
>>issue by increasing the maximum number of bits used for addressing from 28
to 48. This solution increases the maximum
>>capacity of an ATA device to 144 petabytes while maintaining compatibility
with current ATA products.

Does NetBSD cover the above specification? If so, from what version of
NetBSD?

Thanks
 Bruce