Hard drives are dirt cheap these days, and the capacities are growing ever larger. For not much money, you can run down to your local PC store and buy yourself a 200GB drive. The problem that many people will have is that they plug the drive in and they can’t seem to see any more than 137GB.

The reason for this is simple. The ATA interface allows 28 bits for addressing data on the disk, and this places a cap of 137 gigabytes on the drive. Since we now commonly have drives larger than this, the ATA specification has been updated to 48 bits. But, people on older motherboards or older versions of Windows are not properly updated to use the new ATA spec. In order to bring your PC up to speed, you will need to likely update your motherboard’s BIOS as well as install at least Service Pack 1 for your version of Windows. Another method would simply be to bypass the motherboard’s built-in IDE controller and use an add-in PCI controller. Either way, if you perform these actions, you will be able to use your new hard drive in all of its glory.