Re:Intellectual property (Score 3, Informative)

Unless things have radically changed in the decade or so since I last dealt intimately with the IDE interface, the controller hardware has nothing whatsoever to do with block addresses.

The command registers are stored in the drive not the controller. Updating the system to deal with large disks is a device driver issue, not a hardware issue.

You have to partition large drives into 128G chunks on older hardware so that the BIOS can boot the thing. Booting from a larger partition would require a BIOS update.