Dear port-alpha:

For reference, I thought I'd report a 160 GB (well, 160 x 10^9 bytes 
so ~ 149 GB) IDE hard disk worked fine when attached to a main board 
IDE connector on my PWS 500:

pciide0 at pci0 dev 4 function 0: CMD Technology PCI0646 (rev. 0x01)
pciide0: bus-master DMA support present
pciide0: primary channel wired to compatibility mode
pciide0: primary channel interrupting at isa irq 14
pciide0: secondary channel wired to compatibility mode
wd0 at pciide0 channel 1 drive 0: <ST3160021A>
wd0: drive supports 16-sector PIO transfers, LBA48 addressing
wd0: 149 GB, 16383 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 312581808 sectors
wd0: 32-bit data port
wd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 5 (Ultra/100)

That's impressive considering the age of the machine and how recent 
an i386 motherboard needs to be to support a disk this big.  Is there 
a theoretical limit on the size of IDE disk the PWS's IDE controller 
will support?


Ray