No 48bit LBA support = performance loss? or just capacity loss?

[Compman55]

I have an older gateway laptop that still works amazingly fast. I bought a samsung spinpoint PATA 160GB drive and it is being recognized as a 137GB. The bios does not handle 48bit LBA as at time of release we only had 120GB drives avail, and most laps shipped with 40, 60, 80GB models.

So I will admit, I do not need the full capacity of 160GB, but will I loose performance using only 137 of the drives platter surface?

There is no bios upgrade that fixes this issue and I no longer know how to modd these newer phionex / award bios'es.

 

[Compman55]

Anyone??????

 

[VirtualLarry]

No performance difference that I know of. 48-bit LBA just allows over 128 GiB of data to be addressed, using 512B sectors.

 

[V00D00]

Perhaps the partition alignment may alter performance in sequential read scenarios.

This is due to the speed difference accessing the outer and inner tracks of the hard drive. So if the part of the drive you are able to access is on the slow inner tracks of the drive you will see a slightly lower speed than if the data were on the outer tracks.

Overall this difference will not be big, so the answer is "no".