7100 Optimal OS Advice

[LazarusNine]

I've got a 7100/66av and I'm wondering what people think the latest system/OS is best for it. It came with 7.1, but I swapped in a 74GB 10k RPM hard drive. In order to benefit from all that space, I installed OS 8.6 on it rather than having a bunch of 2GB (7.1) or 4GB (7.5/7.6) partitions. However, I'm finding OS 8.6 to be rather slow on the 7100. Is 8.0/8.1 likely to be any faster? Would you recommend sticking with something like 7.6 on it for optimal speed? Cheers!

 

[MJ313]

I'd go for 8.1... I mean, you could run 8.1 on a 25mhz Quadra 700, so your machine should handle it well. If you want, since you have so much space, you could install multiple OS's on that 7100 and play around to see what works best for you!

 

[LazarusNine]

You make a valid point, MJ. I'll likely partition it up into a 7.6/8.1 machine if possible. Still interested in others' views of course!

 

[Strimkind]

If it were not for the 74GB drive, I would have said 7.6 as it is more stable and a lower RAM footprint.

In this case with the 74GB, it makes it more complicated due to the HFS block limitation.  Perhaps with that capacity on such an old machine, it would be better to ignore the HFS limitation, and make multiple large partitions like 10-20GB, and load them accordingly.

It wouldn't hurt to have a 8.1 install as well, should you have any software that requires it.

 

[Cory5412]

On that machine, 7.x should happily be able to use the big disk. What I'd do is boot from a ~4 gig partition, and then create a few partitions at about 10-20 gigs each.

This thread: https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/18290-mac-os-9-ssds/is interesting. Look at this post: https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/18290-mac-os-9-ssds/page-2&do=findComment&comment=273628 in particular. (Please disregard most of what Elfen said in the thread, it is simply wrong.)

Basically, 7.6 on a PowerPC system will happily run a 2TB partition.

If you really really really need 74 gigs of small files, what I'd do is this:

Boot and run 7.6.1 on that machine, in a 4-gig partition with your OS and apps. It'll be so much faster than 8.6 on there. Install Disk Copy 6.x as well. Then, create a single partition with all of the rest of the disk. On that partition, put disk images for all of your data. Mount and dismount as you need.

Doing it this way, you avoid any real problems where "omg why is this text file three megs on disk?" (because an IMG file will more efficiently use the 65,000 allocation blocks on plain HFS) and you can get pretty neat compartmentalization of data as well. Plus, you can copy those IMG files off the machine to a network location pretty easily to make backups. Perhaps, keep one that's simply a copy of your boot system device as a form of imaging the whole computer from time to time.

 

[LazarusNine]

Cory, those are great suggestions. One of the problems I've run into is that Drive Setup (for 7.6 and under) wants to limit my partitions to only 4GB, even those that are not necessarily going to be used for the system. If I make a very large partition, the system - once installed - does not recognise it. So, would you recommend using Drive Setup to create a single 4GB partition leaving the other 70gigs unallocated? Is there a way to repartition the drive AFTER a system is installed on the first partition without losing the data on that single 4GB partition to make space for the 10/20GB partitions you recommend? I'm aware of this in the likes of OS X, but haven't managed to try it on System 7. I'll have a look at your links. Many thanks!

 

[Cory5412]

I don't yet have a solution for partitioning yet. I'd look at my 6100 but I odn't really have any big SCSI disks, or like a big aztekmonster/scsi2sd. To overcome that, you'll probably end up partitioning the disk in Mac OS 8.6 or 9.0 and then coming back in with a 7.6.1 install CD (which should recognize both) and installing the OS onto your 4-gig disk.

I also recommend a simpler approach. Boot drive ("Macintosh HD") up to 4GB (in reality there's no strict limit on this, it just has to be less than 2TB) and Data/Images drive ("Images" perhaps?) with diskcopy images, each up to about 4 gigs.

More thoughts about System 8.0/8.1:

It can be installed on a 68k Mac, in fact I've just recently set up my 840av and that's,  you know, the fastest stock 68k Mac, with 24 megs of RAM (not that impressive but more than some) and to be honest, the impression I always got back in the day was that it was a lot slower with 8.1 on it than 7.1. I never favored 7.6 early on (while I had a "real" AppleShare IP server that also hosted AFP-over-AppleTalk) and 7.1 with 24 megs of RAM leaves a lot of room for various applications which is, of course, what I was doing on the system.

It may actually be worth just trying out each different system, and, hokey as this sounds, determining which one meets your needs best.

What was the reasoning behind the big-fast-hot-disk? Is it just "this was cheap and I needed something" or were you actualy planning on having a whole bunch of user data on the machine?

The fastest OS on that machine will definitely be the version of 7.1 that came with it, without a bunch of stuff added on. If your focus is "run premiere as fast as you can" then 7.1 is probably where you want to be. You'll be dealing with "wasting" most of the disk, or findng a different storage media (scsi2sd perhaps?) but that's where you're going to get the most speed and the least overhead.

 

[LazarusNine]

Thanks for the further insights. I have a single SCSI2SD, which I use in my LC III, which acts as a central hub for my 'classic' network, though a G4 serves as the large file storage (installers, etc) device. So, you're correct in that the 10k drive was an inexpensive solution to improve capacity/drive speed relatively cheaply. Max1zzz's SCSI-to-SCSI adapter works extremely well with it. My OCD kicks in a bit when I think of only 4GB of 74GB being useable, so hence my question about drive formatting.

The interesting thing about the original 500MB drive that came with it is that 1) it has 7.1, which as you say, is bloody fast (relatively speaking), and 2) it has a lot of the original owner's apps - some of which are quite unique. In a perfect world, I'd image that drive somehow, but I don't have an external SCSI disk drive that's up to the task. Though perhaps some way over the network?

Anyway, I'll have a go at all this at some stage and update my experience here. Many thanks, once again. That thread was informative - well, the parts that you suggested!

 

[IPalindromeI]

Pstttt: You can actually run 8.1, and run the Finder from 7.x on it, then strip out the extensions that Finder 8 needed, but 7 doesn't. You now have something that's mostly functionally and visually identical to 7, but supports HFS+. (8.1 and 7.x aren't really that different - it was mostly to market and get rid of the clone contracts. 8.5/6 is when it gets different.)

 

[Schmoburger]

Pstttt: You can actually run 8.1, and run the Finder from 7.x on it, then strip out the extensions that Finder 8 needed, but 7 doesn't. You now have something that's mostly functionally and visually identical to 7, but supports HFS+. (8.1 and 7.x aren't really that different - it was mostly to market and get rid of the clone contracts. 8.5/6 is when it gets different.)

I am actually going to try this now for a lol I think... Never knew about this little workaround til now.