ATA interface versions up through ATA-5 suffered from a drive capacity limitation of about 137GB (billion bytes). Depending on the BIOS used, you can further reduce this limitation to 8.4GB, or even as low as 528MB (million bytes). This is due to limitations in both the BIOS and the ATA interface, which when combined create even further limitations. To understand these limits, you have to look at the BIOS (software) and ATA (hardware) interfaces together. NOTE In addition to the BIOS/ATA limitations discussed in this section, various operating system limitations exist. These are described later in this chapter. The limitations when dealing with ATA drives are those of the ATA interface as well as the BIOS interface used to talk to the drive. A summary of the limitations is shown in Table 7.12. Table 7.12. ATA/IDE Capacity Limitations for Various Sector Addressing Methods Sector Addressing Method Total Sectors Calculation Maximum Total Sectors Maximum Capacity (Byte...