Product manual

Breaking the 137GB Storage Barrier
A-2 Maxtor DiamondMax16 60/80/120/160GB
device storage capacity by the people who designed hard disk structures,
access routines, and operating systems many years ago. They thought,
“Who will ever have xxx much storage?” In some cases, the barriers were
caused by hardware or software bugs not found until hard disks had
grown in size beyond a certain point where the bugs would occur.
Past barriers often frustrated people trying to add a new hard disk to an
older system when they discovered that not all of the designed capacity
of the hard disk was accessible. This inability to access the entire drive is
referred to as a “capacity barrier” and it has been seen and overcome
many times in the computer and disk drive industry.
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.