Question about hard drives

[goalied00d]

Is hard drive capacity, for a system, dependant on the number of address lines on the processor (like memory) or does the hard drive act like an IO device and manages where data goes by itself?

 

[SkyHigh]

HDD is an I/O device to the microprocessor and DMAC, Although HDD has a controller in it to control the motor and intreprets the signals from address, control and data buses for the specific disk, cylinder and sector in order to read/write the file.

 

[tamerakshar]

hi,
HDDs have their own microcontroller already built in it.
processor has no relation with HDD capacity.
for instance when a DMA transaction happens the HDD µc deals directly with main memory leaving the processor for other operations.(The interleaving technique)
BY the way processor also don't affect the main memory capacity but, it affects the memory word length; for n address line machines the word length will be
2^n.
memory word length is no. of bytes that can be transfered at one clk cycle.
TeE ThE EdE