Hello everybody.

I have a Penthium III 450 MHz, motherboard ASUS P2B-F, AWARD MODULAR BIOS v 4.51PG. I want to change my hard disk with a bigger one, and I wanted to buy a maxtor diamond +9, 80Gb, 7200 rpm, but the seller told me not to do it because

1) It is too big and my BIOS will not see it

2) Apart from disk size, My BIOS can't in any case accept 7200 rpm disk even if they are ATA/133 and not the new serial ATA, and I should stick to old 5400 rpm.

Is it true? And if it is, HOW CAN I UPDATE my hard disk, since EVERY disk right now is 7200 RPM?

Thank you very very much

The Asus website isn't helping, but you should check if the bios supports 80 gb disks. If so, it shouldn't be a problem since (2) is complete nonsense. For reference, I use 80 gb 7200 rpm disks on a pentium II msi 6163va board with just udma33 and it works just fine.

I've used 7200 RPM disks on old P1s with no problems. As far as I know, the BIOS doesn't even KNOW or CARE the speed of the disk (in RPM). Secondly, most drives have what's called a "capacity limiting jumper" that allows the BIOS to see it as a 20 or so gig disk, then Linux can query the disk and see the whole thing.

I think the seller in this case... may not know what he's talking about.

iqbala: The seller is giving you bad advice. Vote with your feet and spend your money somewhere else.

Your motherboard is probably a Pentium-2 BX-style motherboard which will not have a problem with the drive size or speed, but the drive will seem a bit slow, since the BX motherboards usually have an ATA/33 IDE controller. I run 80GB to 250GB 7200 rpm drives on BX motherboards without any problems.

But why not pick up a modern PCI IDE controller card to go with the drive? My favorite is the Promise Ultra100 TX2 (or Promise Ultra133 TX2). Cheap and fast!

The newer (black) Western Digital PATA “JB” drives (e.g. WD2000JB) are giving read rates (hdparm -t) around 50 MB/s using the Ultra100 on BX motherboards with 800 MHz P3 CPUs. Also, you can use the two channels to set up Linux Software Raid0 or Raid1.

OK, thank you very much. I trusted you, I bought it and it is working fine.

By and thanks for helping.