Phoenix Technologies Ltd, formerly of Norwood, Massachusetts although it appears to have decamped to Irvine, California, has put together a specification describing an enhanced BIOS-based capability to enable personal computers to support disk drives bigger than the 520Mb limit that is offered by the AT bus: the specification includes support for large capacity disk drives, large numbers of disk drives on a single system, and high speed data transfer capabilities, it says, noting that the Enhanced Disk Drive Specification was developed in conjunction with Microsoft Corp, Conner Peripherals Inc, Seagate Technology Inc, Quantum Corp and Western Digital Corp, and is already supported in Phoenix’s latest BIOS software, PhoenixBIOS 4.0 software program; the IDE hardware limitations are released, and systems equipped with the new BIOS can access drives up to 8Gb in size, and extensions in the specification enable even larger disks to be addressed; support is now also available for up to four drives.
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