Largest partition for a IIfx external drive?

[Huxley]

Hi guys,

I've finally started playing with the SCSI-to-IDE adapter that I picked up from Trag. I've got it installed in an old external case, along with a 30gb Maxtor drive. I'm getting ready to format and partition it, but I'm wondering just how big those partitions can be. Going by:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=8647

I would assume that I'll have to divide the drive into 2gb chunks, but I just wanted to double-check with you guys and see.

I'm on the lookout for one of those Jackhammer SCSI cards - if I find one, will that have any effect on the maximum partition size?

Thanks for the info,

Huxley

 

[beachycove]

2GB or 4GB (with System 7.5) is going to be the max. The limitation is in the System, not in the hardware, so a Nubus Jackhammer will do nothing for you in this regard. I am also not sure what it could do in the way speeding up reads and writes to an IDE drive on a bridge, but that would be interesting to see.

There is no real reason, mind you, to have a drive over 2GB in a Mac II of any shape or size, beyond the fact that the onward march of technology has made it just about possible in recent years. The machinery is just not designed to, or even conceived to be able to, fill up that much space.

Mind you, in a Quadra 840av, I have a Jackhammer with an 18GB RAID (2x9.1GB IBMs), but that is more for the sort of AV work the 840av was designed to do - and I run this system under OS8.1, which makes the large partitions not only possible to have, but also worthwhile having.

What I mean by this last point is that even if you could format the Maxtor as a 30GB drive under System 6 or 7, you would not get anything like 30GB of drive storage because of the limitations of the formatting under those systems (HFS rather than HFS+). You'll get much more sheer storage under Systems 6 and 7.1, if that is what you want, by sticking to 2GB partitions. That might also be the case even under 7.5.

 

[Huxley]

Thanks for the great info, Beachycove!

Shortly after I posted my question, I booted the IIfx from a special floppy that came with my SE/30, called "Hurricane." It's a special Mac drive formatting disk, with custom (supposedly faster) drivers. Hurricane recognized the 30gb drive, auto-partitioned it into 4gb chunks, and began testing it.

Since the testing is going to take hours (and hours...), I just left it running while I'm at work. I'll try moving a System folder over and running some benchmarks to see if it's much faster than the old 1st-gen SCSI drive I've been using.

Again, thanks for the advice!

Huxley

 

[TylerEss]

With 8.1 on your IIfx, you can supposedly use larger than 4gb partitions, but in my own testing they proved extremely unreliable. Feel free to try it out yourself, but don't believe it works until you see it with your own eyes.