HP Compaq dx2300 and dx2308 Business PC Service Reference Guide, 1st Edition

SMART ATA Drives
The Self Monitoring Analysis and Recording Technology (SMART) ATA drives for the HP Personal
Computers have built-in drive failure prediction that warns the user or network administrator of an
impending failure or crash of the hard drive. The SMART drive tracks fault prediction and failure indication
parameters such as reallocated sector count, spin retry count, and calibration retry count. If the drive
determines that a failure is imminent, it generates a fault alert.
Hard Drive Capacities
The combination of the file system and the operating system used in the computer determines the maximum
usable size of a drive partition. A drive partition is the largest segment of a drive that may be properly
accessed by the operating system. A single hard drive may therefore be subdivided into a number of
unique drive partitions in order to make use of all of its space.
Because of the differences in the way that drive sizes are calculated, the size reported by the operating
system may differ from that marked on the hard drive or listed in the computer specification. Drive size
calculations by drive manufacturers are bytes to the base 10 while calculations by Microsoft are bytes to
the base 2.
Drive/Partition Capacity Limits
Maximum Size
File System Controller Type Operating System Partition Drive
FAT 32 ATA Windows 2000/ XP 32 GB 2 TB
NTFS ATA Windows NT/2000/XP 2 TB 2 TB
26 Chapter 5 Serial ATA (SATA) Drive Guidelines and Features ENWW