20 bits can represent numbers from 0 to 1048575 28 bits can represent numbers from 0 to 268435456 which means for 512 byte sectors 134217728, or 128 GB of storage, which is all that LBA (Linear Block Addressing) can manage to do for IDE hard drives. So with 100G disks out there, the barrier was approaching fast. While filesystems could handle volume size into terabytes on some op systems, like linux, and Win2K, handling a single physical extent of that volume (which could span parts of many disks) was definitely limited to 128Gb (or 134 if you prefer the trade Gigabytes which are only one billion characters each) Well, out there, leading the world, is guess who? linux-ide.org The barrier has been pushed back a bit... actually 20 bits. 48 bit LBAs are here courtesy of linux-ide.org, Maxtor BIG DRIVE TECHNOLOGY, and shortly Silicon Image's CMD 48bit host. So what is the maximum size of an IDE drive? How does 128 Terabytes sound? That's enough to hold the Library of Congress six times. It is enough to hold all the documents produced by all the government agencies in the United States since 1793. It is enough to hold 2 hours of all the packets sent by 500 slave zombie trojan windows PCs in a Distributed Denial of Service attack. That should suffice until next year. Then we may have to start talking about Petabytes. Civileme Anyone need a compiler that supports 64 bit arithmetic on a 32 bit machine?
