What a single 8TB MBR Hard Disk Drive Looks like in Windows XP

[98SE]

1 hour ago, jaclaz said:

No, it doesn't make any sense whatever,

The problem with drive letters came out in NT times, this is 20 years ago (or so).

It has been already solved by mountpoints, that are available since the NTFS coming with Windows 2000 (that is 16 years ago), and of course they are perfectly transparent to the OS.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc938435.aspx

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc938934.aspx

 

As long as you have a single NTFS volume, you can make in it as many folders as you want and map to each folder a volume, this way not only you have a virtually unlimited number of accessible volumes, you can also name them in a more meaningful manner.

You can have (say) D:\100>

Example screenshot attached.

jaclaz 

 

 

I'm not sure we are on the same page.

I think you are showing me some sort of manual method.

When you add USB drives for example it will see how many partitions are available and automatically mount them.

If I had an internal drive with 3 partitions:

C: D: E:

E: is my XP OS partition.

Say my USB drive had 21 Partitions

It will automatically mount them as F:-Z: consuming all available drive letters.

If I added another USB drive #2 with 24 Partitions on it they would not be accessible in My Computer since they have no Drive Letter.

It will show up in Drive Management with no drive letters.

As for Command Prompt you have to assign a drive letter to the Partition first.

So are you saying you found a way to automatically mount more than 2500 Drive letters automatically and can keep to the pattern I outlined and all accessible under My Computer, Drive Management, and of course the Command Prompt without doing anything but just adding the USB drives and that's it?

 

Can you show me 100 unique Partitions assigned with Drive Letters in your Drive Management?

The first 24 C: to Z: will be there but I want to see about the next 76 drive letters.

 

[jaclaz]

And you still miss the point, besides the utter futility of your fictional USB disk drive with 21 partitions and the second one with 24.

A mountvol set of commands can be easily scripted in such a way to fulfill your completely crazy request, but then you will start moaning about the need of running a program when you insert the USB device, and I would reply that you could have the batch residing on the USB device and be activated by Autoplay, but then you will promptly reply that you have obviously Autoplay disabled on USB devices, and I could reply that there is no problem in coding a service to watch for USB connection triggering the script, and then you would of course introduce some other artificial limitation (like "I don't want a watcher service running").

I see that it's lost time , have fun creating fictional non-solutions to non-existing problems.

jaclaz 

[rloew]

My point about my Patches was that I already knew what could and what could not be done using Internal and USB 4K Drives five years ago. I could have anticipated what you did in 2012 or earlier.

Next time, try reading my entire paragraph before replying.
The efficiency improvement you referred to is due to larger Internal (Physical) Sectors, not larger Logical Sectors.
As long as reads and writes are properly aligned, the Logical Sector size does not affect performance.
If aligned, Windows 9x runs at the same speed on 512 Byte and 4K Sector Drives. Reverse DDOs would be needed to support 64K Logical Drives with DOS and Windows 9x.
Even more complicated solutions would be needed for NT OSes. A 64K Physical Sector Drive is perfectly OK but most OSes won't align their I/O properly.

Drive letters are managed as single bytes and the tables are hard coded, so forget it.
Using Volume names or Mountpoints is another option, as these are remapped. But direct named ordinal access is not.
Neither of these approaches increases the maximum usable Disk Drive space as you still have a maximum of 24 Partitions.

Banking Drive Letters in DOS may be possible provided that no Pointers or Open Files are present on the Letters being switched.

Edited October 24, 2017 by rloew

[98SE]

@rloew

3 hours ago, rloew said:

My point about my Patches was that I already knew what could and what could not be done using Internal and USB 4K Drives five years ago. I could have anticipated what you did in 2012 or earlier.Next time, try reading my entire paragraph before replying.
The efficiency improvement you referred to is due to larger Internal (Physical) Sectors, not larger Logical Sectors.
As long as reads and writes are properly aligned, the Logical Sector size does not affect performance.
If aligned, Windows 9x runs at the same speed on 512 Byte and 4K Sector Drives. Reverse DDOs would be needed to support 64K Logical Drives with DOS and Windows 9x.

I read everything you wrote the first time and yes you understood my point as well.  But the efficiency I'm talking about was how the use of space on physical 512 Bytes vs 4KB sector hard drives were more efficiently handled so more capacity could be squeezed out of the platters.  The 512 Bytes to 4096 Bytes Sector Sizes used less storage space for the ECC container by combining 8 into 1 and shortening the ECC size length.  A jump from 4096 Bytes Sector Sizes to 65536 Bytes Sector Sizes should gain some in the same manner but maybe not quite as big an improvement as from the jump from 512 Bytes to 4096 Bytes Sector Sizes.  So I see no reason why hard drive manufacturers need to wait and just get together and agree and  jump to 64KB sector sizes and allow patching of W7 -> W10 immediately since these are still in support status similar to the benefit XP SP1 brought.

The 64KB sector sizes which wouldn't work in DOS or 9X/ME as you previously pointed out before wouldn't affect me as I'm looking at huge storage drives which DOS->ME simply can't handle the multicores, extra memory, and special applications not written for them.  I'm very doubtful I would be using such large capacities under real DOS, 9X, or ME but rather on 2K, XP, 2K3, W7->W10 where these 64KB drives will be most applicable.  And these large capacity drives would most likely be used externally via USB so even the adapters might be making it appear to the OS as 4KB sector sizes to make NT happy.

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Even more complicated solutions would be needed for NT OSes. A 64K Physical Sector Drive is perfectly OK but most OSes won't align their I/O properly.

This is exactly where the OS patch from MS comes in to support 64KB sector drives now for W7-W10 and possibly backported for older Operating systems which is the point of just getting right to the the next LBA 64-Bit and 64KB sector drive stage now then waiting around and hitting another barrier to deal with limping to 8KB and up in small increments.

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Drive letters are managed as single bytes and the tables are hard coded, so forget it.
Using Volume names or Mount points is another option, as these are remapped. 

 

But direct named ordinal access is not.          <--- Vital point

Neither of these approaches increases the maximum usable Disk Drive space as you still have a maximum of 24 Partitions.

This is what I was trying to overcome and something that has seemed to have dragged along since DOS.  Most programs won't allow selection of a Drive unless it has a physical drive letter to select.  This is why this Mount points probably wouldn't work to access more than 24 Partitions as single Drive Letters to max out capacity available to the OS and programs.

Even Ramdrives use up Drive Letters so are there any Ramdrives that can preserve drive letters by using Mount points instead or do they count against the 24 Partition limit?

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Banking Drive Letters in DOS may be possible provided that no Pointers or Open Files are present on the Letters being switched.

Yes you mentioned this banking idea for 9X/ME but you can do a similar function already existing in XP by removing the drive letter from a partitioning freeing it and assigning it to another drive but it still doesn't get beyond accessing more than 24 Drive Letters simultaneously for My Computer, Drive Management, or the Command Prompt so it doesn't solve the limitation.  Now has any other Windows version today fixed this?

 

 

 

 

@jaclaz

4 hours ago, jaclaz said:

And you still miss the point, besides the utter futility of your fictional USB disk drive with 21 partitions and the second one with 24.

A mountvol set of commands can be easily scripted in such a way to fulfill your completely crazy request, but then you will start moaning about the need of running a program when you insert the USB device, and I would reply that you could have the batch residing on the USB device and be activated by Autoplay, but then you will promptly reply that you have obviously Autoplay disabled on USB devices, and I could reply that there is no problem in coding a service to watch for USB connection triggering the script, and then you would of course introduce some other artificial limitation (like "I don't want a watcher service running").

If you prefer you don't need USB devices to demonstrate your point.

If you can shrink one of your internal drives and from your Drive Management let's use Drive 1 which appears to be a 320GB drive and has about 128GB space left on it.

Create Thirty two 4GB FAT32 partitions from the remaining partition space or a size of 4096MB for each of the 32 partitions in Drive Management.

Past Z: will these other 8 partitions will be accessible in My Computer, Drive Management, and Command Prompt as a physical drive letter?

If so demonstrate how the first 24 assigned Drive letters and the extra 8 unassigned partitions will be shown as C2, D2, E2, F2, G2, H2, I2, J2 in My Computer, Drive Management, and the Command Prompt.

 

Edited October 24, 2017 by 98SE

[rloew]

You keep missing the point. Large Physical Sectors never were a problem except maybe for performance. Any OS will run, no matter the Physical Sector size.

The major incompatibilities I refer to are related to Logical Sector Sizes. Making larger Logical Sector Sizes does not improve performance or Storage capacity.
It only bumped the MBR limit. Never OSes support GPT so there is no issue there.
64K Logical Sectors would require major changes to all existing OSes so no one is going to bother.
A translation adapter or a DDO for DOS and Windows 9x could handle it but that would defeat any purpose in implementing 64K.
You said they stopped using translators in 6TB Drives. I don't have any, so I can't verify. If so, 4K will probably disappear leaving 512e Drives only.

I know of no way to support more than 26 Partitions simultaneously in DOS, Windows 9x or any Windows NT without major changes.
This why I consider the limit of Windows 9x to be 384TiB, or 416TiB if I can get A: and B: on board. DOS gets a limit of 3PiB or 3.25PiB for the same reasons.

[98SE]

4 hours ago, rloew said:

You keep missing the point. Large Physical Sectors never were a problem except maybe for performance. Any OS will run, no matter the Physical Sector size.The major incompatibilities I refer to are related to Logical Sector Sizes. Making larger Logical Sector Sizes does not improve performance or Storage capacity.
It only bumped the MBR limit. Never OSes support GPT so there is no issue there.

The Large Physical Sectors is on the Hard Drive side.  There is no performance boost from 4KB to 64KB that I'm speculating.  There was a space efficiency boost from 512 Bytes to 4KB sector drives.  So switching from 4KB to 64KB you'd cram another 16 (4KB) chunks into one chunk and use less space on the platters.

Look here for a better description from Seagate as I don't make drives I just use them.  Although at one point we had to create a dust free sanitary environment to mimic a clean room and remove drive platters for swapping during the MFM days.

https://www.seagate.com/tech-insights/advanced-format-4k-sector-hard-drives-master-ti/
 

The Physical Sector Size as you put is is the same as the Allocation Unit Size if we are on the same page here.

 

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64K Logical Sectors would require major changes to all existing OSes so no one is going to bother.

Sure they already did bother us with 4KB Sector Drives and XP wasn't around when these drives were released.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2510009/microsoft-support-policy-for-4k-sector-hard-drives-in-windows

I'm using these drives in USB enclosures so as long as the adapter does the 64KB Logical sector size -> 512 Bytes Emulated bride for XP 32-Bit that's all that matters.  We don't have to care about what kind of Logical sector size the hard drive has but what XP 32-Bit sees from the USB side.  It could be 128KB LSS if you're certain LSS doesn't affect OS compatibility on the hard drive and we'd increase the MBR capacity again going higher.

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You said they stopped using translators in 6TB Drives. I don't have any, so I can't verify. If so, 4K will probably disappear leaving 512e Drives only.

As far as I could tell 5GB was the cut off point.  But some early 8TB models could exist before it was phased and those were quite expensive when released to consider purchasing.  There was no 6TB model from what I could remember I think they simply skipped to 8TB.  But Bare 6TB drives do exist so they could have made a 6TB model.  I believe the drives that are compatible are 4K AF and 512e drives.  Check out the 8TB model I listed and the specs.  You know more about the MBR code then most people here so examine it and tell me what do you see?

 

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I know of no way to support more than 26 Partitions simultaneously in DOS, Windows 9x or any Windows NT without major changes.
This why I consider the limit of Windows 9x to be 384TiB, or 416TiB if I can get A: and B: on board. DOS gets a limit of 3PiB or 3.25PiB for the same reasons.

Yes but what about newer Windows versions? Didn't they run into this problem on Servers and find a way to do what I proposed extending the Drive Letter Mapping sequence?

As for A: and B: you can use them on XP as well but some people still have internal Floppy Drives and USB Floppy Drive would hog B:.

If you removed both then you could use both letters to gain 2 more Drive Letters for an extra 512TB.

In Windows with NTFS and exFAT the limit should be

26 x 256TB = 6144TB or 6.1PB of data on XP 32-Bit with GPT Loader with USB external drives.

Edited October 25, 2017 by 98SE

[rloew]

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The Large Physical Sectors is on the Hard Drive side.  There is no performance boost from 4KB to 64KB that I'm speculating.  There was a space efficiency boost from 512 Bytes to 4KB sector drives.  So switching from 4KB to 64KB you'd cram another 16 (4KB) chunks into one chunk and use less space on the platters.

64K Physical Sectors would provide some improvement. Not as much as the switch to 4K.

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The Physical Sector Size as you put is is the same as the Allocation Unit Size if we are on the same page here.

I assume you are referring to Cluster Size. This is entirely separate from Logical or Physical Sector Size, or from the Windows Cache Block size.

For best performance, the Cluster Size should be at least the Physical Sector Size.

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Sure they already did bother us with 4KB Sector Drives and XP wasn't around when these drives were released.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2510009/microsoft-support-policy-for-4k-sector-hard-drives-in-windows

 

Microsoft does not acknowledge support in XP.

I think the 4K Support may have been for SCSI, which allows different Sector Size Formats to be used even in a single Drive.
Windows 9x has some support up to 2K Sectors built in. I don't remember if it was complete.

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I'm using these drives in USB enclosures so as long as the adapter does the 64KB Logical sector size -> 512 Bytes Emulated bride for XP 32-Bit that's all that matters.  We don't have to care about what kind of Logical sector size the hard drive has but what XP 32-Bit sees from the USB side.

True, but what is the advantage of having 64K Logical Sectors then?
XP would still only be able to access 2TiB with translated 512 Byte Sectors,

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It could be 128KB LSS if you're certain LSS doesn't affect OS compatibility on the hard drive and we'd increase the MBR capacity again going higher.

 

If it is translated to 512 Bytes, the limit is still 2TiB. The 128KB I referred to earlier is the Cluster Size limit of my Patches.
Unless I can find a way of modifying the FAT32 Drivers to work with Cluster addresses rather than Sector Addresses, it won't matter.

 

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As far as I could tell 5GB was the cut off point.  But some early 8TB models could exist before it was phased and those were quite expensive when released to consider purchasing.  There was no 6TB model from what I could remember I think they simply skipped to 8TB.  But Bare 6TB drives do exist so they could have made a 6TB model.  I believe the drives that are compatible are 4K AF and 512e drives.  Check out the 8TB model I listed and the specs.  You know more about the MBR code then most people here so examine it and tell me what do you see?

 

That Drive is an Internal Drive. The MBR says it is translated to 4K. This means that you are partitioned it using a separate Enclosure or Adapter that is translating.

The Western Digital "My Book" External Drive series has 2TB, 4TB, 6TB, and 8TB Models. I could not determine from the Specs if any of them translate.

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Yes but what about newer Windows versions? Didn't they run into this problem on Servers and find a way to do what I proposed extending the Drive Letter Mapping sequence?

 

I'm not aware of any.

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As for A: and B: you can use them on XP as well but some people still have internal Floppy Drives and USB Floppy Drive would hog B:.

 

As far as I know, no Motherboard with a Floppy port supports more than 2TiB in it's BIOS.

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If you removed both then you could use both letters to gain 2 more Drive Letters for an extra 512TB.

In Windows with NTFS and exFAT the limit should be

26 x 256TB = 6144TB or 6.1PB of data on XP 32-Bit with GPT Loader with USB external drives.

 

I have no idea why the 256TiB limit. Is it a Partition limit or a Drive limit?
Why USB External Drives, why not Internal?

[Tripredacus]

9 hours ago, rloew said:

As far as I know, no Motherboard with a Floppy port supports more than 2TiB in it's BIOS.

There is at least one that might fit this description, and I have used one of these boards before. It is the MSI 760GM-E5 (FX) which has a floppy connector, has a BIOS (not a UEFI) and has a thing called 2.2TB Infinity that can be enabled.

https://us.msi.com/Motherboard/760GME51_FX/Overview

https://us.msi.com/Motherboard/760GME51_FX/Specification

2.2TB Infinity is not a UEFI at all, it is some other method of allowing a 2.2TB or larger disk to be of GPT type with a single partition and boot the OS. There are some hardware compatibility issues with these boards, mostly with ODDs. You could only use the 2.2TB Infinity option if the SATA mode was set to IDE. It was not an option if set to AHCI or RAID.

I had some issues with this board and had posted about it before here:
http://reboot.pro/topic/16315-22tb-infinity-vs-uefi-with-winpe/

[rloew]

I cannot find any detailed information on 2.2TB infinity. If it does not support more than 2TiB using INT 13 Calls from DOS then it isn't what I was thinking of.

[98SE]

16 hours ago, rloew said:

For best performance, the Cluster Size should be at least the Physical Sector Size.

That was my point in having 64KB drive physical sector sizes and using 64KB AUS or Cluster Sizes on the OS side.

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Microsoft does not acknowledge support in XP.

I think the 4K Support may have been for SCSI, which allows different Sector Size Formats to be used even in a single Drive.
Windows 9x has some support up to 2K Sectors built in. I don't remember if it was complete.

They don't which is why if they are already imposing 4KB native drives which is not XP compatible then no reason to not just jump to 64KB native drives and skip these interim jumps from 8KB-64KB.  They would be able to come up with OS patches today if agreed between MS and drive manufacturers as the new standard.

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True, but what is the advantage of having 64K Logical Sectors then?

Faster write rates for multiple HD video stream recording or anything bandwidth intensive.

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XP would still only be able to access 2TiB with translated 512 Byte Sectors,

That's why they would release a new USB enclosure with the proper translator for XP compatibility using the 512 Bytes Sectors just as they had done previously but updated for 64KB physical sectors.

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If it is translated to 512 Bytes, the limit is still 2TiB. The 128KB I referred to earlier is the Cluster Size limit of my Patches.
Unless I can find a way of modifying the FAT32 Drivers to work with Cluster addresses rather than Sector Addresses, it won't matter.

The adapter does the magic.  Now if they made a SATA to SATA 32-Bit address translation adapter then you wouldn't be confined to external USB connections only.

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That Drive is an Internal Drive. The MBR says it is translated to 4K. This means that you are partitioned it using a separate Enclosure or Adapter that is translating.

That is correct.  I haven't hook it up internally yet since I'm not sure if XP would try to write to it and cause corruption.  I might have to do another bare internal drive test on the 3TB to get a true MBR for you.

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The Western Digital "My Book" External Drive series has 2TB, 4TB, 6TB, and 8TB Models. I could not determine from the Specs if any of them translate.

No they phased them out already.  Possibly eBay might have some 3rd party releases of this adapter from China but like you said you wanted a foundry before you'd reverse engineer it.  I've seen plenty of eBay sellers make ISA cards with an IDE controller and I would think they are less technically knowledgeable then you.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-XT-IDE-rev-4-Assembled-Tested-8-Bit-ISA-XTIDE-Glitch-Works-IBM-5160-5150/272835477012?hash=item3f8642fe14:g:aJwAAOSwcndZrxFl

Didn't you say you had a 4TB MBR model that could be used in XP 32-bit externally or was that a regular external 4TB GPT model?

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I'm not aware of any.

It looks like we are screwed by MS then.

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As far as I know, no Motherboard with a Floppy port supports more than 2TiB in it's BIOS.

You are not using the Floppy port you are using the reserved A: and B: drive letters only.  I have used A: and B: for a USB flash drive so assigning these to a 256TB GPT drive in XP GPT Loader with external USB drive support it will work.

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I have no idea why the 256TiB limit. Is it a Partition limit or a Drive limit?

No idea.  Ask MS directly the reasoning.  All those documents have claimed this 256TB Limit.  I think it has to do with the NTFS limitation but somehow exFAT suffers the same limit.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/140365/default-cluster-size-for-ntfs--fat--and-exfat

This one is more descriptive:

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Support for large volumes. NTFS can support volumes as large as 256 terabytes. Supported volume sizes are affected by the cluster size and the number of clusters. With (232 - 1) clusters (the maximum number of clusters that NTFS supports), the following volume and file sizes are supported.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn466522(v=ws.11).aspx

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Why USB External Drives, why not Internal?

Easy swapping of drives between machines running 24/7.  Can't hook up these special USB address translation adapter drives to SATA ports directly.  These are needed for MBR and XP 32-Bit without a XP 32-Bit GPT Loader for external USB drives.

 

In theory you could have up to 7 internal USB cards using PCIe / PCI slots and use an iGPU.  The maximum could be 8 USB ports per USB card and 56 USB devices already max out the 26 Partition to each Drive Letter limit.  So if this maximum total partitions accessible via drive letters cannot be overcome then 6.1PB will be the max possible.

 

Internal drives you would be limited by the amount of SATA ports usually 6-8 today on most Motherboards without expansion cards.

Found a massive 10 port SATA 6Gbps card to compete with USB ports.  Vista OS and up support only on the box.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Ableconn-PEX10-SAT-10-Port-SATA-6G-PCI-Express-Host-Adapter-Card-AHCI-6-Gbp/112321639

It does not have OS drivers to operate XP 32-Bit at all so the GPT internal drive idea wouldn't work except with the on Board SATA.

Did some digging around but I'm not sure how SATA cards interact with each other and can you chain 7 of these cards and still work with the onboard SATA controllers to get 78 SATA ports?

Do SATA cards allow access to drives in DOS or are they dead till you are in the OS with the proper drivers loaded?

My experience with Intel and Asmedia SATA controllers requires the SATA driver to be slipstreamed first or no drive access.

Most other SATA cards I've seen usually are 4 Ports so 36=28+8 on Board Max possible Sata Ports assuming they have XP 32-Bit driver support.

USB still seems to be a simpler solution for adding drives and maxing out the Twenty Six 256TB Max Partition Size / Drive Letters Limit.

Also limited internal drive space to mount them all.  It would be possible to stack a bunch of USB external drives and chain a bunch of power strips.

Edited October 25, 2017 by 98SE

[dencorso]

16 hours ago, rloew said:

The Western Digital "My Book" External Drive series has 2TB, 4TB, 6TB, and 8TB Models. I could not determine from the Specs if any of them translate.

They have 4KiB clusters. Internally, they may be just like the "My Passport" series, not having a sata conector and a sata-to-usb bridge: instead, all chips are onboard and the only exposed conector is usb3. That's why I believe they may be 4Kn. You might get yourself a recertified one for experimenting and the 3TB one seems a good cost/benefit compromise, IMO.

[rloew]

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For best performance, the Cluster Size should be at least the Physical Sector Size.

That was my point in having 64KB drive physical sector sizes and using 64KB AUS or Cluster Sizes on the OS side.

That only helps if the Clusters are aligned on 64K boundaries. 

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Microsoft does not acknowledge support in XP.

I think the 4K Support may have been for SCSI, which allows different Sector Size Formats to be used even in a single Drive.
Windows 9x has some support up to 2K Sectors built in. I don't remember if it was complete.

They don't which is why if they are already imposing 4KB native drives which is not XP compatible then no reason to not just jump to 64KB native drives and skip these interim jumps from 8KB-64KB.  They would be able to come up with OS patches today if agreed between MS and drive manufacturers as the new standard.

No one is imposing 4KB Native Drives. I have never seen one. Only SCSI supports them. All AF Drives are 512e. USB Enclosure Manufacturers decided to make 4K translating adapters as a stopgap for XP users.
Microsoft had no part in that. Microsoft as already completely abandoned XP so they are not going to add new support. Forget about 64KB Native or 64KB Translated. Only  64K Physical 512e Drives are reasonable.

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True, but what is the advantage of having 64K Logical Sectors then?

Faster write rates for multiple HD video stream recording or anything bandwidth intensive.

No. It is just as fast to request 128 512B Sectors as it is to request 1 64KB Sector. The Drive is going to translate it into 1 64KB read operation either way.
Current Controllers transfer the data as one monolithic block anyway so there is no loss there either.

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XP would still only be able to access 2TiB with translated 512 Byte Sectors,

That's why they would release a new USB enclosure with the proper translator for XP compatibility using the 512 Bytes Sectors just as they had done previously but updated for 64KB physical sectors.

Physical Sectors are transparent to USB as well as SATA. The Drive can translate to 512e faster than the USB adapter, so there is no penalty to 512e.

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If it is translated to 512 Bytes, the limit is still 2TiB. The 128KB I referred to earlier is the Cluster Size limit of my Patches.
Unless I can find a way of modifying the FAT32 Drivers to work with Cluster addresses rather than Sector Addresses, it won't matter.

The adapter does the magic.  Now if they made a SATA to SATA 32-Bit address translation adapter then you wouldn't be confined to external USB connections only.

My BOOTMAN3 DDO does the job with Internal Drives. How do you think I booted DOS with a 128TiB C: Partition. 

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That Drive is an Internal Drive. The MBR says it is translated to 4K. This means that you are partitioned it using a separate Enclosure or Adapter that is translating.

That is correct.  I haven't hook it up internally yet since I'm not sure if XP would try to write to it and cause corruption.  I might have to do another bare internal drive test on the 3TB to get a true MBR for you.

I don't want your MBR. It is not going to tell me anything.

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Possibly eBay might have some 3rd party releases of this adapter from China but like you said you wanted a foundry before you'd reverse engineer it.  I've seen plenty of eBay sellers make ISA cards with an IDE controller and I would think they are less technically knowledgeable then you.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-XT-IDE-rev-4-Assembled-Tested-8-Bit-ISA-XTIDE-Glitch-Works-IBM-5160-5150/272835477012?hash=item3f8642fe14:g:aJwAAOSwcndZrxFl

The E-Bay sellers are just selling unbranded Cards under this own name. Zero technical knowledge required.
PATA Controllers are far simpler than SATA. The one in the E-Bay picture is a very basic design using a microcontroller.

Nowadays they just slap an existing IDE Controller chip and some glue logic on a card. The Chip is manufactured in a foundry.

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Didn't you say you had a 4TB MBR model that could be used in XP 32-bit externally or was that a regular external 4TB GPT model?

I said, I had a 4TB USB Hard Drive that did not Translate. I never Partitioned it so it is neither MBR nor GPT. I'm not sure if I had tested it with XP. 

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I have no idea why the 256TiB limit. Is it a Partition limit or a Drive limit?

No idea.  Ask MS directly the reasoning.  All those documents have claimed this 256TB Limit.  I think it has to do with the NTFS limitation but somehow exFAT suffers the same limit. 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/140365/default-cluster-size-for-ntfs--fat--and-exfat

This one is more descriptive:

 Support for large volumes. NTFS can support volumes as large as 256 terabytes. Supported volume sizes are affected by the cluster size and the number of clusters. With (232 - 1) clusters (the maximum number of clusters that NTFS supports), the following volume and file sizes are supported.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn466522(v=ws.11).aspx

Apparently NTFS has a 32-Bit Math limit at the Cluster Level. I would have to look at the ExFAT Spec.

The compatibility tables are not correct. FAT32 is supported on all of the OSes listed up to 2TiB even if Microsoft refuses to let you create them

I have pushed the Cluster Size limit in Windows XP FAT32 to 256KB using 256 Byte Sectors.
If I could do the same with NTFS, it might be possible to increase the limit to 1PiB.

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Why USB External Drives, why not Internal?

Easy swapping of drives between machines running 24/7.  Can't hook up these special USB address translation adapter drives to SATA ports directly.  These are needed for MBR and XP 32-Bit without a XP 32-Bit GPT Loader for external USB drives.

I use tray-less racks. This allow me to swap Drives easily. I do have to reboot though.

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In theory you could have up to 7 internal USB cards using PCIe / PCI slots and use an iGPU.  The maximum could be 8 USB ports per USB card and 56 USB devices already max out the 26 Partition to each Drive Letter limit.  So if this maximum total partitions accessible via drive letters cannot be overcome then 6.1PB will be the max possible.

The USB limit is 128 per Root Controller.

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Internal drives you would be limited by the amount of SATA ports usually 6-8 today on most Motherboards without expansion cards.

Found a massive 10 port SATA 6Gbps card to compete with USB ports.  Vista OS and up support only on the box.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Ableconn-PEX10-SAT-10-Port-SATA-6G-PCI-Express-Host-Adapter-Card-AHCI-6-Gbp/112321639

It does not have OS drivers to operate XP 32-Bit at all so the GPT internal drive idea wouldn't work except with the on Board SATA.

 

The listing is gone. It is obviously an AHCI Controller. You can have 32 Direct Ports. Each Port can be expanded with a FIS Multiplier.
It might work with XP if you add an AHCI Driver. The newest UNIATA appears to have AHCI Built-in.

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Did some digging around but I'm not sure how SATA cards interact with each other and can you chain 7 of these cards and still work with the onboard SATA controllers to get 78 SATA ports?

You don't "chain" them. You put them in separate PCI/PCI-E Slots.
I think the BIOS limits you to 31 Hard Disks. Windows 9x has some minor issues above 8.

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Do SATA cards allow access to drives in DOS or are they dead till you are in the OS with the proper drivers loaded?

Unless they are UEFI only, they must support DOS or they could not load any OS.

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My experience with Intel and Asmedia SATA controllers requires the SATA driver to be slipstreamed first or no drive access.

Most other SATA cards I've seen usually are 4 Ports so 36=28+8 on Board Max possible Sata Ports assuming they have XP 32-Bit driver support.

USB still seems to be a simpler solution for adding drives and maxing out the Twenty Six 256TB Max Partition Size / Drive Letters Limit.

Also limited internal drive space to mount them all.  It would be possible to stack a bunch of USB external drives and chain a bunch of power strips.

Pick your poison.

Edited October 25, 2017 by rloew

[rloew]

10 minutes ago, dencorso said:

They have 4KiB clusters. Internally, they may be just like the "My Passport" series, not having a sata conector and a sata-to-usb bridge: instead, all chips are onboard and the only exposed conector is usb3. That's why I believe they may be 4Kn. You might get yourself a recertified one for experimenting and the 3TB one seems a good cost/benefit compromise, IMO.

I wasn't aware that they did not have conventional Internal drives in them. I only opened one Seagate drive and it had a standard drive inside. The internet is full of how-tos for removing the drive from the case.

[dencorso]

I know. But (1.) all my 4 "My Passports" are 2TB, so they're 512n and (2.) removing the case from a "My Passport" is relatively easy, but the quite fragile locks are destroyed, so that there's no reassembilng them. A very careful friend of mine did open a 1TB "My Passport" intending to use the HDD internally in a client's machine, and now owns a bare usb 3.0  external disk...
I bet opening a "My Book" is also a one-way operation...

[rloew]

They are all probably AF Drives making them untranslated 512e. I damaged the case on the Seagate I disassembled also. It had a detachable base with the adapter in it allowing me to switch from USB to eSATA.

The base could be used by itself with a bare drive or another drive of the same series. It automatically switched from 4K translation to no translation depending upon the size of the attached drive.

The SATA connector of the internal drive was behind a slot that was too narrow to let a standard SATA connector fit. Otherwise I would not have had to disassemble it to experiment with a direct connection without buying their eSATA base.