| LBA Until
LBA, PCs with IDE controllers were limited to accessing hard disks of
528MB or less. Why? Because IDE's addressing model didn't allow addresses
large enough to work with bigger drives. (It wasn't really IDE's fault.
IBM's original design for disk access on the old IBM AT started the
problem.) LBA, a feature of the Enhanced IDE (EIDE) drive standard, lets
the drive controller perform an address conversion, bypassing the
bottleneck and allowing for drives up to 8.4GB. |