Hard Drive Controller Buffer Size FingerPrint Flag

SoftwareShield System Feature Guide > FingerPrinting / Machine Locking > FingerPrint Option Flags > Hard Drive Controller Buffer Size FingerPrint Flag

## Hard Drive Controller Buffer Size FingerPrint Flag

When this FingerPrint option flag is set, the hard drive controller (of the primary master hard drive) on the host machine is queried for its buffer size. Most hard drive controllers are on-board the actual hard drive and return a buffer size in bytes in this string. This value is almost always a power of two. This value is generally stored in hardware and cannot be changed in software.

### Typical Internal Values

- "2097152"

- "134217728"

### Operating System and Security

This flag will be able to successfully query the hard drive controller for its buffer size on Windows 2000, NT and XP. It will return an empty value in Win9x. The current user must be logged in with administrative privileges or it will return an empty value.

NOTE: When the operating system does not support the option or the option cannot execute properly due to insufficient user privileges, the option simply returns an empty value. This is not an error condition and the FingerPrinting mechanism will continue to work on that machine, except the uniqueness of the FingerPrint is somewhat diminished. For this reason, it is always best to combine a few FingerPrint options instead of using just one.