Should Acer Aspire T135 work with a big hard disk?

I have a brand-new Western Digital 1.5TB drive. The Acer Aspire T135 XP Home system won’t detect it if it connects to the SATA port. However the system detects it if it connects to a USB port while installed in an external hard drive enclosure.

I have updated the BIOS. It doesn’t fix the problem and the BIOS looks the same as before so it probably is the same old version.

If this system by default does not detect big SATA hard disks, is there any way to go around it apart from having it as an external hard drive?