I have an old Inspiron 2200 that I use for school work and the internet. My dog managed to knock it out of my hands and the hard drive took a dive. So I need to buy a drive for it, it came with a 40GB. But I figure if i'm buying a new drive might aswell get something bigger. I've caled Dell but they only say well it came with a 30,40 or 60GB drive. Then they want to sell me a 80GB Ultra ATA (same as a ATA-6 of course) for $300, which i'm not going to pay. I'll just buy a ATA-6 drive off newegg, for under $100. My question is how big of a drive can I put in it? I've called dell and looked around the site but I can't seem to find anything about how big of a drive the bios will accept. I can get a 160GB drive for under $100 and if it will work i'd like to go with it. I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 off a external 160GB Usb drive right now, but it's slow as all hell.
IIRC, there are limits for HDD size. but the limits are like 7,8GB; 37GB and 128GB. But of course your BIOS might handle larger aswell. How old is it exactly? Usually >2000 year computers have no limit. Also, I think there is no limit as you can boot from a 160GB drive.
You might want to read some of this site: http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_drive_size_barriers.htm I think it's unlikely that you'll have any problems with a 160Gb drive. Have you considered buying a PCI SATA card and a SATA drive instead of PATA. That way if you upgrade to a SATA PC then your drive will be ready. Something like thisdoesn't add much to the cost of the drive and a SATA drive will be cheaper per Gb than an PATA now anyway.
