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From: jfw@proteon.com (John Woods)
Subject: Re: Limits on Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD
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References: <pwdD25Htq.58A@netcom.com> <D26603.FzH@park.uvsc.edu> <RICHK.95Jan10103953@netcom17.netcom.com>
Date: Tue, 10 Jan 1995 21:31:37 GMT
Lines: 17

richk@netcom17.netcom.com (Richard Krehbiel) writes:
>In article <D26603.FzH@park.uvsc.edu> Terry Lambert <terry@cs.weber.edu> writes:
>> The MAX disk size on SCSI is fixed; if you don't like it, you'll
>> have to discover a standard other than SCSI -- actually, I think
>> the 8G limit of SCSI isn't surpassed by anything on a PC, but I
>You know, I was under the impression that the SCSI protocol has a 32
>bit value for disk sector numbers.  With 4G 512-byte sectors, that
>comes to 2 terabytes.  And SCSI sector size may be other than 512
>bytes, too.

The older SCSI read and write commands used 3-byte block numbers, implying
a limit of 16 million blocks, or 8GB (512b/s).  The 10-byte command block
read and write commands use 4-byte block numbers, for 2TB (which should be
comfortably excessive for a few years, at any rate).  I assume the SCSI-1
definition contained only the 6-byte command forms, but I don't know for
sure; the longer command forms were certainly common before SCSI-2 got nailed
down.