MVP3 Drive Capacity Limit

[time]

Does anyone either know, or would like to guess, what is the largest hard drive capacity that will work with an Epox EP-51 MVP3E-M notherboard?

Epox has kindly deleted all references to this board from their website, but I'm fairly sure it uses the same BIOS as the EP-58 MVP3C.

It would be either end of 1998 or early 1999, I reckon. Apart from the MVP3 chipset, it has 3 SDRAM DIMM sockets and 2 EDO 72-pin sockets (max 384MB), and 1MB cache.

As near as I can tell, other Epox boards from that era (such as BX3) have had BIOS updates to take them from 32GB (?) to 65GB.

 

[Mercutio]

All the MVP3-based boards I have laying around stopped at 32GB, although I wasn't dilligent at upgrading their BIOSes.

I have similar boards from Soyo, FIC and Tekram.

 

[Tannin]

I have not used this particular board, Time, but I don't think I've ever seen an MVP3 or MVP4 board that was not 32GB limited.

 

[cquinn]

This is a rather late reply, but I have a FIC VA-503+ board that is
running with a WD800BB right now.

IIRC FIC had to come out with a "not officially supported" BIOS
update to allow it to be recognized.

Since then I have moved that drive onto a Promise ATA-100 controller
I had lying around, to allow it to run on its own channel.

So the MVP3 should be capable of addressing larger drives, but if
Epox no longer supports it you might have to run the drive on a
separate controller, or search for a hacked BIOS.