rloew

It looks like support for Drives between 2TiB and 16TiB is disappearing. In addition to reports that newer USB Drives no longer use 4K translation, I just tested a newer USB/SATA Adapter and it does not do 4K translation either. The Adapter did work with a 4Kn Drive, so this may be the only option left for >2TiB with unmodified 2K/XP.

Those configuration options are not that unusual. LoneCrusader has a similar system. My SATA Patch will allow you to use all 6. It is possible to modify the INF file to cause the SATA Ports to be an Unknown Device. You will only have Compatibility Mode access to them.

Yes but not many would want to dig around in DOS to setup the Ramdrives. Otherwise why did Microsoft develop Windows? But as an attempt to simply the OS user interface so even kids and grandparents could use the computer instead of CLI geeks. Aside from that assuming they setup the Ramdrive in DOS preloaded in the Autoexec, if they loaded into 98SE OS and wanted to change the Ramdrive letter from a DOS assigned Z: to X: would this work while within 98SE OS or would exiting to real 98SE DOS from 98SE OS work or would a warm reboot be required after modifying the autoexec be done first? I would assume you need to do a warm reboot since the OS loading has either dirtied or locked the Ramdrives from changing drive letters or capacity. Not many of my Customers are kids or grandparents. A GUI that edits the AUTOEXEC.BAT file would be simpler than trying to integrate it. Reboot is needed. Well if you can make a hidden Ramdisk (not use a drive letter) as the Temp drive location it would be useful in that case as most people won't be digging around there. You also mentioned you had a drive letter mounter to do any switching so you could switch it to a real drive letter when needed and force another drive out. A Temp Folder has to be named. I could make an INT 13 RAMDisk that provides an unnamed drive, but this requires programs that can use it. The swapper only runs in DOS. It can swap an existing Drive with a non-existing Drive but they both need to be Drive Letters A-Z. Most of the ideas I stated were to make it such but as you said they are not possible. So if the foundation of ideas can't work the subsequent ones will not matter. No. Robustness means strong, sturdy, reliable, not fancy. Your ideas are unrelated to "robustness". Not sure. I haven't checked your prices vs the current prices for others. I suppose if yours did cost $20 then a GUI version for $30 would be reasonable to me and possibly others. Or a combo package of both versions for $40 basically older CLI and newer GUI options for the user. Maybe you should check first. Then the price above I think would be fair for most all things equal. What is the capacity limit of the Ramdrive for DOS and for 9X/ME? 2TiB. Depends on your target audience. With 9X you are restricted and need a compliant 9X/ME based graphics card and drivers. Going to real DOS most older DOS based games should work and native applications or utilities. Now if FreeDOS was used instead possibly the source code could improve DOS hardware compatibility that might open up multiple cores to be utilized. The 98SE USB advantage is allowing a USB sound device to be identified as a Sound Blaster type when used with DOSBOX. There is less work for the user to get a DOS gaming rig going on a modern system in this manner than it would be to install 98SE from scratch on a Coffee Lake system. Now if you're not a frequenter of Vogons you might not know the niche it may fill there for legacy gamers. But this is the only viable idea I have of making 98SE relevant today on newer machines so it isn't about me. Remember I have older P4s with ISA slots and have made SkyLake work with 98SE but the limitations and the steps to get it to work properly versus the 98SE DOS using 98 system files and USB 2.0 support would simplify a lot of the problems. Most standard 9X/ME applications can run properly in XP so direct 9X/ME apps really are now pointless to most consumers. However your background programming expertise is mainly in DOS and an understanding of 9X/ME so this is something I would think you'd be capable of doing rather easily. We all wish we were billionaires but then we wouldn't be working anymore. Like you said there is no free lunch so if you want food on the table you must make something that brings in the dough like your patches. Just eyeballing the 98SE tests I've done on socket 1151/AM4 motherboards the pool of people trying to get these to work on these modern systems is less than I would have suspected. Even recent attempts by others seem to have failed where I was successful and not many probably use my technique either. DOS itself is rather simplistic and easier to get working even on a Coffee Lake system. There is also no AHCI driver issue to deal with or any potential 9X/ME based conflicts that come up plaguing the system. Otherwise I'm out of any other ideas that you can sink your teeth into of value. I see no other branch to prolong 98SE's usefulness on modern systems and that's just being honest. So it comes down to a FREEDOS modification to support multicores and being able to run 98SE programs at the command line. 98SE USB detection of devices (sound and game controller) in 98SE DOS the system is running. Two other useful programs MUNT and DOSBOX that would definitely be 9X/ME programs if it could be run at the 98SE Real DOS command line would make 98SE relevant on modern systems. Otherwise I would say the death coffin is pretty much closed for 9X/ME relevance which is regrettable. You can run 9x without Video or Disk Drivers. I already have a partial solution for AHCI. New machines use USB 3 so 9x Drivers would not be of any help even if I could interface them. I am very rarely on Vogons so I don't know how many games can't be run on 9x that can be run on DOS. I need the FAT16 for the backward compatibility of DOS programs in case it dislikes FAT32 partitions. The vast majority of Programs don't care about the FileSystyem type. Sounds like SSDs going forward for larger capacities would be a better solution to avoid these misalignments. The drives do take a beating and slow down reusing deleted space. I already have a TRIM Program. The USB Bus is 4K in this case. The SATA Bus is 512B. Are all the USB to SATA adapters you have 4K USB Bus and 512B SATA Bus including the two USB docks you previously mentioned? What current > 2.2TB drive capacities do you have now aside from the recent 6TB 4Kn drive? Does your SATA to USB adapter allow the 6TB 4Kn drive to recognize the entire drive as one large MBR NTFS partition uncapped? Most of my adapters auto-translate. They use 4K Sectors on the USB Bus for Drives >2TiB and 512B Sectors for smaller Drives. The two Docks are non-tranlating I have at least one External Drive that uses an adapter that appears to always translate since it is <2TiB. I haven't opened it so there might not be a physical adapter. You might want to see if your new 4Kn drive hooked via SATA directly can interface with XP SP1-3 and the same for USB 2.0 Port to XP SP1-3. Does both the SATA and the USB method allow booting off this 4Kn drive on the Z87? Windows XP SP3 does not support 4Kn drives hooked via SATA. The BT-300 USB Adapter passes through the 4K Sectors so it should work with XP the same as more conventional large External Drives. The Z87 won't boot off 4K USB Devices, only 4Kn SATA Devices. So both XP SP3 and the USB Stack handle 4KB at the FS level? Are you saying XP works with your 4Kn drive directly connected via SATA and also using your SATA to USB on the USB 2.0 ports? The FS supports 4K. The lack of IDE support prevents a SATA Connected 4Kn Drive from working. The IDE stack is used if using the IDE controller with IDE devices but what about a BIOS setting SATA in IDE compatibility mode, does this use the IDE stack in XP? How does this affect computers using the XP AHCI mode which SkyLake and all modern systems are now stuck on? Different BIOS manufacturers use the term IDE rather ambiguously, typically to refer to the older Technology. It can mean: PATA not SATA Legacy not Native Register not AHCI Not RAID In the case of XP the IDE Stack handles all Register based Controllers, not AHCI. PATA vs. SATA and Legacy vs. Native Mode settings are not relevant. If you have an AHCI Driver or use the latest UniATA, you have AHCI support. You are talking about the IDE stack? What files are needed to be patched? This sounds like something that would affect NT/2K since they lack AHCI. Not sure. At least PARTMGR.SYS. You have the Paragon GPT Loader, I don't. It replaced files. So what ends up happening in 9X when using the 2K Sectors or your 4Kn drive? 2K is the limit for an unmodified 9x FS. I upgraded it to 4K with my Patches. I can't test 2K with my 4Kn Drive. I tested 2K performance by putting a FAT32 Partition on a CD. Well you can examine my 8TB post I updated it with the DOS MBR I extracted. RFDISK can make any MBR I need. Your post is irrelevant here. I don't think anyone has actually "achieved" and hooked up a true 16TB single drive as MBR in XP just yet. Now there was this Samsung 16TB 2.5" SSD that cost a fortune that only Bill Gates' son could afford. It's doubtful the owner of something like that would hook it to XP or make the attempt to get it seen as a 16TB MBR drive but most likely GPT on Windows 10. I said "can be done", not did. The capability to do 16TiB with USB is old news. Apparently you are admitting the even a 16TB Drive is going to end up being Partitioned with GPT. So stop pushing >4K Sectors. Assuming the OS's supported 64KB wouldn't the 64KB open up higher capacities just as 4K vs 512B? I would figure it would be less of a burden when transferring TBs of data per second one day. I was referring to Physical Sector size. The capacity increase only applies to MBR. EMBR and GPT won't have this problem for a long time. The timing bug in Windows 98 will reappear long before these speeds are achieved. Yes the 64KB to 4KB translation does slow it down but since it's done on the drive side the OS wouldn't care as long as the OS was happy with the 4KB blocks. As I mentioned before, switching from 4K to 64K Physical Sectors would only provide a mild capacity improvement. The ECC overhead was already reduced by going to 4K. The translation itself does NOT slow things down as long as alignment is maintained. Translation only affects Pointers and Length not the actual transfer. A 512B request such as read 16 Sectors starting at Sector 800 is translated to a 4K request to read 2 Sectors starting at Sector 100. Everything else is the same. There's only one way to find out and test on as many motherboards one has starting with the newest. Since I have more Intel MBs you probably won't have to do that much work weeding out just the AMD ones that work with 4Kn drives. I'll take care of the other half as soon as some cheap 2.5" 4Kn drive pops on the market to do some more testing. But for the Bootable testing even the smallest capacity drive will do down to 128GB to see how they work with older OSs. Microsoft has been notorious for leaving out exact facts that matter. I'm sure they might as well have stated somewhere DOS will not work on anything past a P4 but here I am using it still today. You will need to buy the Drive and my TeraByte Plus Package. I am planning to add the newest 4K fixes soon. You cannot use an AUS smaller than the Logical Sector size. Fully accessible means that the entirety of the Disk can be accesses without causing corruption. The "Patches" refer to my TeraByte Plus Package Patches. This the only relevant Package to this entire discussion. When I wrote it, I combined all my major Disk related projects into one Package. This includes: LBA-48 support. Providing support above 2TiB for 512B Disks. EMBR support. Large Logical Sector support. Larger Cluster support. Native Mode and PCI/PCI-E Card support. Partition fixes and improvements Replacement Boot loader for IO.SYS. BIOS replacement DDOs. Advanced Partitioning and Formatting tools. You can see and boot from a 3TB SATA connected 512e Drive but you cannot access all of it. DOS would not understand an address above 2TiB. If you use the 4TiB MBR approach, you will corrupt the Drive.

Who cares?

If you want me to do tests, you can ship the MAC to the address on my website.

What is so "Special" about your SATA to USB Adapter. It sounds like a standard Translating Adapter like the ones I have. There is no difference in the layout of data because of that translation. Only the size of the chunks (Sectors) is different. The MBR would still appear first and any PBRs much later. It would not report the PBR at the beginning unless you added a DDO. My experience is that 4K translated USB Drives are not Bootable. See my Thread on 4Kn Drives for more info.

I never said anything about going to Pirate Bay I believe these are your own assumptions. I said there were torrents which is just a peer2peer way of getting a file. Just like someone uses FTP it's just another file transfer method. If you check the Apple Forums they probably have a "legal" torrent link somewhere if you don't want to go through the Apple Store method. There are a lot of "legal" files that are torrent files so don't mix this up and confuse this with pirate sites. Most unknown sites I wouldn't trust the content. If you see an official torrent link set up by an Apple Forum moderator I would consider downloading it that way if it's available. If this method no longer exist then yes you need a Mac or as I pointed out buying a cheap copy of an much older Snow Leopard for $20 from Apple. .... I never made a comment about the legality of torrents. I made a point that you suggested that I violate the distribution terms of the OS by downloading it without paying either for a MAC or Snow Leopard. Since I don't have an interest in MACs, I have no plans to spend money to test it. No confusion as I know you were looking at "internal" drives. I would go for the laptop 2.5" because you can use a SATA to USB adapter to power it up (no power brick adapter). And laptop drives can be used internally so what you are looking for are actually internal 4Kn 3.5" SATA drives. Lower heat dissipation. These 3.5" drives get so hot I keep the bare outside of the chassis. Laptop Drives may be simpler to connect and use less power, but they are more expensive and have less capacity than 3.5" Drives. I have not seen a 4Kn 2.5" Drive anywhere. I test in 98SE as I more tools to do tests. Good luck with finding a 2.5" 4Kn Drive. I'm sure you'll find out through testing. Are you talking about the logical sector size the USB would appear to the OS? That and whether it would work at all. So far one did not work at all, the other passed through the 4Kn Interface. There is no confusion the Hard Drive will be 28X TB but the Windows limit states 256TB so if MS meant 28X then according to you they should have used 256TiB or state in full the exact bytes for accuracy and avoid any confusion. I only went with the hard drive manufacturer capacity in decimal but Windows does not declare in Bytes for exactness when they stated 256TB. Microsoft may have decided to drop the binary prefix altogether and assume the values themselves are now Binary rather than Decimal but using the conventional Decimal name. So a KB to them is 1024 Bytes instead of 1000 Bytes. This might cause more confusion so they may need to use the older 28X TB value if they want to make you happy since they didn't use 256TiB but 256TB. The 256TB probably also looked better over 28XTB. .... Citing more examples of how often people abuse the nomenclature isn't getting us anywhere. Microsoft is a particular example. There have been lawsuits over theor discrepancies. You can probably get away with using the wrong units since the context often suggests one or the other. I try to use the proper units to minimize any uncertainties. I said Clusters, not Sectors. I increased FAT32 Clusters to 256 Sectors in Windows 9x and 512 Sectors in Windows XP. Using 4K Sectors this would result in Cluster Sizes of 1MiB and 2MiB respectively. I have already prepared a modified NTFS Driver to experiment with, but I have to figure out a way to create or hack an NTFS Partition with these Cluster sizes. Creating a FAT32 Format is easy. NTFS not so much. If I wrote a GPT Loader, it would work with External Drives in DOS and Windows 9x. But according to this Intel says GPT was supported on Vista 32-Bit. Are you saying it requires a 64-Bit CPU to run this 32-Bit OS with GPT? I actually ran Vista 32-Bit on an old Pentium-M laptop. No. You do not need a 64-Bit OS to use 64-Bit Sector Addresses. Just 64-Bit Math. That's because Paragon did not write suitable USB Drivers. There is no reason why it cannot be done. We'll see how long MBR will survive. Perhaps I will end up transitioning to GPT at 32TB+. The current memory limitations on XP 32-Bit might be overwhelmed for every day "future internet" usage requiring a jump to XP Pro 64-Bit or later and I'm open to that possibility if I've exhausted all other methods. I'm pretty sure you will be transitioning above 16TiB. Beyond that, it is either GPT or EMBR. We'll see when the time comes as 18TB might be within reach within 5 years or less and depending on prices of drives as storage capacity increases and their monetary values plummet. I think a lot sooner. This probably would make eXFAT a better candidate for XP and already in existence since 2006 making it a better workaround if exFAT could support > than the current NTFS 256 TBB / 281 TB limit. Is it. I thought it had the same limit. You mean your 11.444 MiB / Mebibyte hard disk drive. The first hard drive I used was a 5MB Seagate ST-506 MFM full height 5.25" so it occupied one large rectangle slot so that left the other slot for a large full height 5.25" floppy drive or later dual half height 5.25" 360 drives when the technology improved. I still remember the red blinking light on those some drives also used green. I kind of miss seeing those drives blinking on their own. Later was a ST-412 10MB MFM also a full height hog. There were ways to cheat and get 50% more space with RLL controllers. Since these hard drives really got filled up fast copying floppies to them their only redeeming quality was not needing to fiddle with floppy disks to boot DOS and a faster boot time. The loud obnoxious noise and a tendency to get bad sectors or fail completely were its downfall. Some nice PCs could read the controller and it would show the hard drive and floppy drive info on the front display panel. It made computers more interesting then. Not sure if it was 12MB or 12MiB. Although the Drive itself was a full-height 5.25" Drive it came in an external enclosure about half the size of my Computer.

I'm talking about 9X GUI support like other commercial Ramdrives like those in XP. Customizeable drive letter choosing, setting Ramdrive size, and the ability for multiple Ramdrives up to 24 or 23 meaning if C: is taken by your hard drive then D: to Z: can be assigned to use the available > 4GB+ RAM in what manner they see fit. Rebooting the system will retain the saved settings. If a user chose to they could have D: to Z: as Ramdrive drives of different capacities as long as it doesn't exceed the available RAM. Now if you could also create hidden Ramdrives that don't use Drive Letters or extend the Drive Letters beyond Z: C2, D2, ... Z2 pattern so drive letter consumption won't be a limitation. Size and Drive Letter are already customizeable. You can have as many as you want. To make them permanent, put the commands in AUTOEXEC.BAT. Hiddem RAMDisks would have no value since they cannot be accessed. You already know that Letters beyond Z are not going to happen. You still did not answer my question about robustness. It's not about how much extra but how good the interface and features it has so people want it. If your 9X Ramdrive with a true 9X interface was created on par with an XP Ramdrive then a similar pricing to what other XP Commercial Ramdrive exceptional software would be priced if the feature set is identical. Now if there are certain memory limits for 9X where the Ramdrive size is capped then yes you can't charge the same but less assuming you could do 2TB Ramdrive in XP but your 9X version was capped at much less due to an OS limit that can't be broken. Now if you were really serious about doing it I could probably help guide the user interface design and look of it to where I would call it exceptional. I did not ask how much people would pay, I asked how much EXTRA people would pay for the GUI Interface over what they would pay for the existing design. PSE supports 2TiB so that is not a problem. The Networking Interface doesn't need to be implemented as DOS browsing isn't critical. Just getting the 98SE USB interface working on 98SE DOS. I would say the USB Audio and maybe the USB game controller are really the ones that need to get targeted. It is about you. No one else is asking. If you are not a Billionaire, buzz off. 9x runs as well or better than DOS on any Motherboard. The functionality lost is not even available in DOS. I'm thinking more like 8 figures for your universal product. I use 8GB for my Boot Partition. I do not have a lot of Applications. I have 6TB of Data Partitions. No improvement. Translation involved rescaling the Address and Length Arguments of a Request. The Data Transfer is the same. Only misalignments cause problems because extra transfers are needed. There is only one Adapter. The USB to SATA Adapter. The USB Bus is 4K in this case. The SATA Bus is 512B. Yes. Yes. Now I am testing scenario #3 and #4. Hard drive platter 4KB Physical - HD circuit board to SATA connector - Logical 4KB Bytes - SATA Cable - Sata Controller - OS Hard drive platter 4KB Physical - HD circuit board to SATA connector - Logical 4KB Bytes - SATA to USB Adapter - USB Cable - USB Port - OS Normally 512. I did not test XP SP1. XP SP3 can handle 4KB at the FileSystem level. The USB Stack can also handle 4K. The IDE stack only handles 512B. Since the IDE Stack only handles 512B Logical Sectors. There is not way to adapt a Hard Drive to increase capacity. Your proposed circuit just makes it a 4Kn Drive, undoing the internal translation, A Patch or new Driver for XP is needed. This should include 2K and XP 32-Bit? The FileSystem in Windows 9x actually supports 2K Sectors but some other parts of the stack don't. No idea about 2K. XP apparently was designed with 4K support. What do you mean here by limited to 4K? Now here you are saying XP can understand 4KB Sector size and a regular 4KB native SATA drive will work with XP without any adapter? The FileSystem in XP supports 4K. I thought it might fully support 4K after reading the web page I posted. When it failed in my experiments, I reread the page carefully. Apparently he was using a RAID Driver that did work. The standard ATAPI.SYS does not. I could not get UNIATA to work either. The adapter boards already breaks the 2.2TB MBR standard limit. So I would not say 18.0TB MBR max on XP is something to laugh at. I said what has been "achieved". 16TiB with USB already can be done. Nothing new here. Maybe if there was a compelling reason to go to 64K. The gain from going from 512B to 4K is far greater than the gain from going from 4K to 64K. The fact that paging is 4K and many OSes such as 9x and presumably NT use 4k blocks internally, made 4K an easy choice. 64K would require a major rewrite of every OS FileSystem. More likely they would add a translation driver to convert it down to 4K, which defeats the purpose of having 64K Logical Sectors in the first place. Incidentally, Microsoft doesn't mention that you cannot boot 4Kn drives on many Motherboards, even if the OS supports it. You must have read my Topic between updates. I added Windows 8 shortly after. I'm adding more updates in a few minutes. You said you were partitioning Disk since MFM Days. I'm sure you haven't been partitioning 4TB Drives that long. You can connect any size Drive to a SATA Controller and access or even Boot from it in DOS. It just won't be fully accessible without my Patches.

I received my MG04ACA600A 4Kn 6TB Hard Drive today. I have started running tests with it. The results so far are: The MA785 BIOS, the M5A97 CSN BIOS, the Z87 CSM BIOS and the MSI AMD970 SLI Krait CSM BIOS recognize the Drive in IDE Mode but report it as having 512 Byte Sectors. All Reads and Writes report errors due to overrun. The Z87 UEFI and the MSI AMD970 SLI Krait UEFI Shells can access files on the Drive. The M5A97 does not have a built-in EFI Shell. The Z87 CSM BIOS in AHCI Mode will boot TeraByte Plus Patched DOS 7.1. Windows 98SE will not boot properly in normal Mode, only Safe Mode. Windows 98SE on a 4Kn Drive will boot if DOS is booted from a 512e Drive and the Drive letters swapped. The AMD970 in AHCI Mode only started loading DOS but hung before it was fully loaded. TeraByte Plus Patched DOS 7.1 supports the Disk if the BIOS does. TeraByte Plus Patched Windows 98SE supports the Disk if the Drive Controller is reset when the Driver is loaded. TeraByte Plus Patched Windows 98SE can be used in IDE Mode by Hot Swapping the Drive after DOS has completed loading. I have written a DDO Overlay to support this Drive. This let me run DOS and Windows 9x on my Z87 and MA785 in IDE Mode. I had to disable the DDO if booting Windows XP otherwise Windows XP will not boot. Windows XP 32 on the MA785 does not recognize the Disk. As noted in the article I linked previously, a 4Kn compatible Driver is needed for Windows XP 32. The latest UNIATA Driver caused an endless loop even if the Drive is not recognized by the BIOS. XP will not boot if the BIOS or a DDO supports 4Kn. NTLDR crashes due to buffer overflow. Windows 2000 will not boot if a 4Kn Drive is present, even if it was not detected by the BIOS. Windows 7. 8 and 10 support the Disk and Data on it. No special Drivers needed. They will not create Partitions beyond 2TiB on an MBR Drive. A separate Partitioner is needed. I was able to Install Windows 10 on the Disk using EFI and GPT on the AMD970. The Disk also booted on the Z87. The M5A97 EFI does not support 4Kn Drives. It has an early version of EFI (2012). The non-translating BYTECC USB Duplicating Dock and Vantec NexStar Duplicating Doc, do not support 4Kn. The auto-translating BYTECC BT-300 USB Adapter fully supports this Disk. I was able to Partition, Format, and load Data on the Disk using the TeraByte Plus Patched Windows 98SE. The recent non-translating Kingwin USI-2535 USB Adapter supports this Disk. It passes through the 4K interface. Windows 8 and 10 can be Installed on a 4Kn Drive. Windows 7 will install up to the first boot and then crash afterwards. Ubuntu 16.04 Installs without problems.

I never used FreeDOS or IMDISK. Windows 9x also does the same Integrity checks, as does DOS 7.1. These are the two OSes I am most familiar with. XP only checks the first byte, but for reasons I don't know, it also allows 0x49.

I have identified the problem that MrMateczko had. The AHCI Driver is now working for his H110 Motherboard.

That is still several generations later than the original IBM PCs that I used to work with. I have a few motherboards somewhere.

I have a 1 bit (not Byte) Memory Device. It is the size of a hard cover book. Two vacuum tubes and other parts in a plug in module.

Ask granny. Your parents were too young.

The 12MB Drive was MFM and cost $3000.

I wrote one.

I believe it sets up some default versions for some standard programs.

The unit reminds me of a toaster. The way two drives are vertically inserted worries me if it were to tip over. Try 3TB and larger with XP 32-Bit to see if translates and allows the entire drive as MBR. I tested it on 9x not on XP. Obviously MBR will not work. EMBR and GPT would work if it can access above 2TiB. A MAC isn't required. Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge have done it. You can get Snow Leopard for cheap and get the Hackintosh working. Then login to the Mac Store to download the newer versions for free or if you know someone with a MAC they can download it to a flash drive. Like I said many have made a USB method to simplify the install process. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-snow-leopard I am aware of Pirate Bay. I was referring to legal methods. I'm sure they would have 2TB 2.5" drives. These will be USB powered making them portable. You are confused. I was looking at 4Kn Internal Drives, not laptop drives or USB 4KB Native drives currently have no USB adapters that I've seen that work with XP. The drive inside the XP compatible USB enclosures use a 4KB Physical -> 512e model. I said that a 4Kn Drive would behave the same. I did not say they could be used with an USB adapter. Since I do not have a 4Kn Drive, I can't test my various USB adapters to see if any work. I also don't know what USB interface size it would use. Indirectly 2.5" drives also work with the adapter taking up less space. No one was talking about space. No offense but there is no naming confusion. I choose or refuse to use the computer naming standard of Kilo Binary Bytes. Also as a purist I would never call a 360KB floppy drive a 360 KiBiByte floppy drive. 360 KiB looks lame. They should have just kept all the Prefixes the same and made it KBB, MBB, GBB, TBB, PBB, EBB, ZBB which would have been accepted more easily as all you are indicating is the extra B is for "Binary". You're welcome to try and spread the ISO/IEC 80000 standard but I think it's liberal "PC" gone amok. The original already existing standards sound better, but adding an extra letter adds 50% more waste going from 2 to 3 bytes. If they were going to use that then just spell out the prefix or go with the extra B. Ask anyone which they would rather pronounce, learn, and use? KILO byte or KiBiByte? You were born saying Kilo. Kibi? What is this the Keebler elve? MEGA Byte or Mebi Byte? Mega Millions or Mebi Millions? Mega wins. GIGA Byte or GiBi Byte? GIGA wins. No contest. TERA Byte or TeBi Byte? Who doesn't love Tera or closely resembling Terra like Earth? PETA Byte or PeBi Byte? Toss up. PETA stands for you know what so pro pets I'm game. But Pebi? Sounds tiny like a pebble. EXA Byte or ExBi Byte? Exa looks and sounds better. ZeTTa Byte or ZeBi Byte? Zetta definitely. YoTTa Byte or YoBi Byte? --- this one is toss up as Yobi doesn't sound that bad although Yotta Byte sounds like Ya Outta Bite. And are you going to get the United States to change from Miles to Kilometers next? Anyone using computers since the 1970s knows what a Bit, Nibble, and Byte is and that 1KB = 1024 Bytes and there is no confusion. Hard disk manufacturers aren't going to switch and neither are the newest graphics cards. Any software program I see using it I junk it since it breaks the standard. I don't like it either but improper usage leads to confusion. You use TB for both Decimal and Binary based sizes. You even came to an incorrect assumption because of it. You said: They are both the same limit, 256TiB or 281TB. There is no cap here. You also abused the roundoff of 18TB to get 288TB. I still stand by my 256TB standard or TeraByte standard. Even wiki and Microsoft do as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS Limits Max. volume size264 clusters − 1 cluster (format); 256 TB − 64 KB (implementation)[3] Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award is given to "technology experts who passionately share their knowledge with the community."[1] The awarded are people who "actively share their ... technical expertise with the different technology communities related directly or indirectly to Microsoft". An MVP is awarded for contributions over the previous year. Windows File System Troubleshooting 1st Edition, Kindle Edition, Publication Date: June 26, 2015 https://www.amazon.com/Windows-File-System-Troubleshooting-Halsey-ebook/dp/B00UBYYY34/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1509174353&sr=1-1&keywords=9781484210161 Page 22: https://books.google.com/books?id=ylQwCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA22&lpg=PA22&focus=viewport&dq=256tb+ntfs+limit https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn466522(v=ws.11).aspx You are not the only that doesn't follow the standard. Fortunately the context usually is enough to tell the difference, although as you get to higher numbers the discrepancy increases. The maximum Cluster size max increase with larger Sectors, increasing this limit. This works with FAT16 and FAT32. That's GPT and not MBR and it's still confined to internal drives and not external drives. Scenario #1 requires GPT since it needs 64 Bits. It proves the concept even if it doesn't cover all drives. If I wrote a GPT Loader, it would work with External Drives in DOS and Windows 9x. If it is 512 Byte then the MBR limit is 2TiB. If it is 4K then the MBR limit is 16TiB. If you want larger, you would probably have to order custom firmware and write a new set of drivers. It's a matter of perspective. 1PB today is what 1TB looked like to us then when we were using 8GB drives. How long did it take for us to get from 8GB to 1TB? Not that long. It's going to happen and we are going to find ways to consume that space and want more. I'm not referring to PetaByte drives. I'm referring to your suggestion of super large Sectors. to support MBR. 2PB on NTFS would be tremendous but only if MS updates NTFS to v4.0 to exceed 256TB. I'm referring to the current NTFS. A future version that exceeds 256TiB on it's own would not be compatible.. My first hard Drive was 12MB.

Which step? If you need the MAC OS it is free to all unlike Windows. Just look for a torrent of it to get the ISO. Some people have made it easy to transfer to a USB flash drive simplifying the process. Since a MAC is required, I assume that it is not freely redistributable. Good any 2.5" models? Didn't look. Probably would be too low a capacity to be of interest. This I'm not 100% on just yet. I have to try hooking up this 3TB 4KB 512e drive to XP 32-Bit to check if direct access of all 3TB of MBR data still works. My guess is you can't write to the drive in XP 32-Bit to the entire 3TB directly. I think it will still be capped at 2.2TB without the address translation adapter. Now if it turns out I can read / write to the entire 3TB then that would mean any 2.5" 3TB or larger could do the same. I'm talking about a 4Kn Drive. It would behave the same as a 512e drive with a 4K translating USB Adapter. There would be no reason why access would stop at 2TiB. The size of the Drive, 2.5" or 3.5", has nothing to do anything we have been talking about. And that’s why Windows NT5.1 / XP 32-bit needs 4Kn for making drives >2TiB fully usable. Because it can only use 32-bit MBR partitions. Windows NT5.2 / Server 2003 / XP x64 doesn’t have that problem, because it can use 64-bit GPT, at least for data volumes. So given what is said there I'm not sure if this guy is saying as long as the drive is 512e or 512 Bytes to the OS no matter if the physical sector size is 8KB->64KB it won't make any difference and larger physical sector sizes would give larger and larger reachable MBR capacities without needing to go to GPT. He said nothing about larger sizes than 4K. He also didn't make the mistake of confusing Physical Sector size with Logical Sector size that you keep making. You are confusing TB and TiB. 64KB and NTFS are limited to 256TiB. Paragon did it. This is the reason for using GPT. No. My EMBR can do it also and would be a lot easier to implement than larger Sectors. There is nothing to mimic. The SSD Memory array is addressed in 512 Byte Blocks via the SATA interface. The addressing Block size is arbitrary so it can be set to anything in firmware. Now you are getting ridiculous. In any case, the NTFS limit probably would increase with Sector size as the maximum Cluster size should increase. I think the NTFS limit would be 2PiB with 4K Sectors.

I found my notes on my USB tests. The VANTEC NSP-D400S3 and the ByteCC Duplicating Docks use 512 Byte Sectors on their USB Ports regardless of Disk size. The Hitachi 2TB ST Touros use 4K Sectors. I have not disassembled them.

Many of them are newly created files, so they have zero length and no start sector in their directory entries on disk. Although they are effectively truncated, SCANDISK will not see them or report them. There is no practical way to connect the Lost File fragments to the Files they came from in this case.

Yes I know the "e" stood for emulated but if SSDs don't have a defined Sector Size wouldn't they be emulating 512 Bytes? If it can appear as 512 Bytes then there is no reason they can't appear as 4KB or 64KB. Since it is not changing Sector Size, it would not be considered "emulation". There is no reason why it could not report 4K or 64K. MACS are Intel based now so yours probably can be made into a Hackintosh quite easily on the Z87. https://www.tonymacx86.com/ You need a MAC to follow the instructions given. Is UEFI still stuck with this old limit? No idea. That was one of the cheaper ones available since you hadn't seen a 4KB bare SATA drive. Not a fan of Seagate either as far as reliability back in the day had a bad reputation except some of their recent laptop drives absorbed from Samsung are pretty reliable. Options are limited these days and prices goes up for everyone. SSDs are probably going to be the future so I'm not sure if 4KB drives will actually be mainstream. I found much better prices. Why? They don't work with XP nor the adapter. It'll be quite awhile before I switch to 4KB Native drives assuming 512 Bytes and 512e disappear. Those would be the ones to stockpile for legacy support. Apparently they do work with XP 32 not XP 64 according to the website I linked earlier.

Those WDC Drives would probably be 4Kn. There would be no point to doubly emulate inside the Hard Drive since I assume there is no access to a 512e Port. There would also be no SATA Controller inside either.

I found some Toshibas. One seller apparently doesn't know the difference between 512e and 4Kn. The one he was selling was not a 4Kn according to Toshiba. I found a website where someone did a bunch of experiments with a 3TB 4Kn Drive. http://wp.xin.at/archives/2581

If that is the only message from SCANDISK then there is no real risk of letting it save them. You won't know if anything is corrupt until you run your system more extensively. Lost File fragments are the least serious type of error. A bad shutdown will cause them. Windows creates a number of logging files that end up in these fragments. I just delete them if there are no more serious errors.