System 6 Hard Drive Size?

[Tempest]

Looks like the adapter I pictures has jumpers on the board, I assume one of those is for termination.  I can't read the board in the auction though, I'll have to check out what it says when I get home.

Honestly my current 1GB drive will probably hold everything I need, but it would be nice to have the extra space for things since I have access to the drives for free (and that adapter is about $5).  I wonder how much space every game that will run under system 6 would take up?  1GB? 2GB?

 

[Elfen]

I had to look at the images though photoshop and enlarge them. One of the Pins says "MTR", I believe that is the one that is for termination.

Space, you mean the actual files to be stored or things the game might have during play like maps, saved games and preferences?

I may have missed it but what kind of Mac is this for? 68K as in Mac Plus, Mac SE or Classic; or 030 in the SE\30 and Classic II?  Though bigger is better as in hard drive space - I would dare say 1GB if it is 68K and 2GB if '030.

 

[gsteemso]

While the point about the aggregate size of the software library that will run on a given machine is a good one and quite apropos—for example, if my rather unreliable memory is not playing silly tricks on me, I believe the entire corpus of software _ever_ released for the Commodore PET line (that’s nearly 40 years’ worth!) is under 40 MiB in size—I must point out that, in recent years, personal computing has caught up to its more expensive cousins in that by far the bulkiest data most people now store consists of files to be _manipulated_, rather than those to be _executed_. You can readily prove this to yourself… all you have to do is compare the size of your MP3 library with the size of the program you use to play it back.

In summary, the only really irrefutable conclusion we can draw from real-life experience over the last 50 years is that, like any sort of physical capacity (empty buildings, highway lanes, etc.) found in conjunction with frequent human activity, the virtual capacity found on an empty hard drive is guaranteed to get completely filled up after a few years if you regularly make enough actual use of the system (as opposed to just powering it on once every few months and, say, playing a game or the like). Make the drive twice as big as you need for a clean install (don’t forget to count your program installs and relevant data files as well as the OS!) for a rarely used trophy system and at least an order of magnitude (two orders is often even better, depending on your usage patterns) larger for a real working system. Substantially larger drives may take longer to fill up than to fail of old age, but wastefulness aside, are almost certainly not going to prove actually harmful in any way.

 

[SE30_Neal]

Why not just have a nice floppy collection instead

 

[Tempest]

It's a Macintosh Classic running System 6.0.8. I actually have a directory full of System 6 games on my G3 that I snagged from Macintosh Garden, but it's hard to tell the true size of it since some of those archives include things like box and manual scans, disk images, and even some CD images.

Yes the jumpers say (in order): LED, SYN, DLY, MTR, ID3, ID2, ID1, ID0.  I found a website that has some explanations:

LED= LED LIGHT

SYN= SYNCHRONOUS

DLY= DELAYED START

MTR= REMOTE START

So I'm guessing ID0-3 are for setting the device ID.  Will jumpering ID0 terminate it as well?  Remote Start certainly isn't what I want.

Well some of the games have to be run from floppy so I'll have quite a sizable collection of those as well (I made a post about HD installable vs disk only games).

 

[SE30_Neal]

I must confess to liking the sound and action of using floppys lol, sad i know! I'll look for your post

Cant help you on the pins though: Elfen, uniserver, unity, Cc any of those guys might know though

 

[Tempest]

Well my post was about how to tell which games can be installed on a HD and which must be run from floppies.  Turns out there's really no way to tell other than to just try it.  However if someone wants to start making a list of floppy only/hard drive only games that would be interesting.

https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/26910-hard-drive-installable-games/

 

[SE30_Neal]

Once ive got my se/30 online and start downloading games i'll update your list, seems a good thing to do

Neal

 

[Elfen]

So I'm guessing ID0-3 are for setting the device ID.  Will jumpering ID0 terminate it as well?  Remote Start certainly isn't what I want.

No it wont. I never heard of "Remote Start" but I guess that's the terminator jumper.

SCSI ID's... When the Mac boots, it start counting from 7, then 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, and then repeats one more time before going to Floppy Boot; during the count it sends an "ATT" (Attention signal) to see if there is anything at that SCSI ID. Some devices take longer to answer than others so the Mac waits a couple of seconds to see if anything answers the call. This is why your First (usually internal) SCSI device is set to 0 - it is the first one to get the call and answer back, and boot up the machine.

The Mac itself is ID #7, so never set any other ID to 7.

Since this is a Classic, check if your ROM Drive is OK. Turn on the Classic while holding down Apple-Option-X-O. After a RAM Test, it should boot up quickly into System 6.08 with a Floppy ROM Disk icon on the top and your hard drive under it. This is a great feature Apple put only into this 1 machine; great because if your hard drive fails you can still boot up to recover what you can. No other Mac has this option.

 

[Tempest]

I can try it with both and see what happens.  I don't think I can hard the drive in this way.  If I do, I have plenty of spares.

 

[rezwits]

Because I stayed within those 2GB/4GB partition boundaries, the largest drives I ever put in a 68K Mac is a 8GB, I would not know how big of a drive can you put in. It's strange because I seen posts of "my hard drive died, can I use a 500GB replacement?" and when they do, the drive is dead to them. In some other cases, like in a smaller drive of 50GB, it works, sometimes.

For me, I figure - how big is the 68K (and later PowerPC) Mac Software Library? A couple of gigs? Of that, how big is my Mac Library? Less than 240MB. So why would anyone need a couple hundred gigs or even a tetrabyte of space for their Old Mac Software Library? Or their Multi-Media Library? 4 - 8 GB, I can see as a reasonable size for an old Mac System. But that is my opinion.

I love your post elfen, but I keep hearing you quote these number about "How big is 68k Mac Software Library? A couple of gigs? Throw that number out the window DAWG.  The whole Mac Library, is probably around 2 TB.  I mean yeah your not going to use it as a server so if you installed every "perfectly sane usable app" you're looking at about 20 GB and that means they are all working with space to function.  Then you would need at least 20 GB to run projects.

Here is an example.  I have a 4 GB SCSI2SD with 2x2GB, and I have in all essence, CodeWarrior, MPW, MacApp, and Photoshop, and Acrobat, with all the ResEdit goodies, with utilities, and on my "project partition" I have 800 MB free to work, build and compile, and the System partition has 500 MB free, in which sometimes, I have to use 256 MB of that for VM.

I am all booked up with only 6 Main Apps.  My other machine is almost the same way except that has the Adobe Design Suite.  But with the same amount free.  I would love to load up the "ease of use" Strata Studio Suite, but it's not gonna happen.  We need more GIGS!! haha (but 2Gigs for the whole 68k library?)

Laters...

oh btw, I am going to need some help, going over one of your posts I have saved, for putting a CF in my G3/266.  Good read,  Just want a recommendation.  When I get to that.

 

[Cory5412]

There's definitely more than 2 gigs of classic Mac software.

I personally don't even double up on versions very much and I have like 5 gigs of installer image files.

oh btw, I am going to need some help, going over one of your posts I have saved, for putting a CF in my G3/266.  Good read,  Just want a recommendation.  When I get to that.

Is this a beige, an iMac, or a downgraded blue-and-white?

On the beige and an iMac, there's no real max limit for Mac OS 8/9. For OS X, you must make sure the OS X boot partition is within the first 8 gigs of the disk. I was able to do it with a 7.8 gig partition, other sites recommend 7.4.

Otherwise, get an IDE/CF adapter and whatever CF card you can find and have fun.

Another option if it's a tower is to install a PCI SATA card, which should also conveniently get around the limitation involving the first 8 gigs of the disk.

If it's a blue-and-white, then you don't need to worry about partition sizes, but the first generation can have errors with slave disks.

 

[Cory5412]

This is System 6 however. How big is the 68K Software Library under System 6? I remember seeing a CD Pack of Apps and things on 3 CDs by one of the User groups that included a lot of commercial software with it.

By this account alone, that's 2 gigs of software just for Mac system 6.

So, I would say that it's unfair to characterize the Mac software library as 240 megs.

I generally agree that it's not worth installing, say, every single version of Photoshop, especially if you never use Photoshop. In this day and age, I won't say that it's unfair or a bad idea to have that software, since data storage is trivially cheap at this point, and connecting old Macs to file servers is pretty easy.

 

[ScutBoy]

Yes the jumpers say (in order): LED, SYN, DLY, MTR, ID3, ID2, ID1, ID0.  I found a website that has some explanations:

LED= LED LIGHT

SYN= SYNCHRONOUS

DLY= DELAYED START

MTR= REMOTE START

So I'm guessing ID0-3 are for setting the device ID.  Will jumpering ID0 terminate it as well?  Remote Start certainly isn't what I want.

ID0-3 will set the ID. Will not affect termination.  This adapter is set up to accommodate wide bus, so that's why you get jumpers 0-3 - you can set SCSI ID up through 15 that way.

DLY is usually used to delay the start of the drive motor 10 seconds times SCSI ID. So - SCSI 0 will spin up right away, SCSI ID 1 will spin up after 10 seconds, SCSI ID 2 will spin up after 20 seconds, etc. This is to stagger the startup of the drives so as not to overstress the power supply. In the old days with the big 5.25 inch (or bigger) drives, this was an issue.

MTR would usually mean to wait for the actual start command over the SCSI bus, rather than spin up automatically on power-up. Sometimes on certain drives the meaning is opposite. I think some of the old, big Fujitsu drives were this way. Won't affect termination.

I don't see any provision on this adapter to set termination. I've used similar adapters with Seagate Savvio SCA drives, and have used in-line SCSI terminators at the end of the cable before plugging into the adapter. So far that's worked OK for me.

You may want to consider the max1zzz adapters since he's made his with configurable termination. I used the in-lines since I had a bunch of them laying around.

 

[rezwits]

I was thinking about putting in an ATA 133MHz card, and putting in a CF SD with adapter (from China, of course), but was wondering if just using the built in 66MHz ATA bus or going with the 133MHz card would matter, as far as the Adapter and CF card go as far as SPEED?

Thanks

 

[Elfen]

ATA133 card in a Classic Mac? never heard of it.

Otherwise, everything else makes sense. A 200X (30mb/sec) CF Card would be more than enough a Classic Mac (and a ATA 133MHz card). Most cards up to 16GB are at the 200X range, depending on who makes them. But anything faster than a 300X CF is just a waste of Speed as it will never be seen; the maximum speed one will see will be that of the interface's maximum, not of the faster card's speed.

 

[rezwits]

not a classic mac, in a G3/266 PCI, because I want to put an actual SSD drive in but, you got me thinking about CF and adapters.  But I think a 60GB ssd would be great, I am going to transfer this over to the actual CF card thread...

 

[Elfen]

Oh! LOL!

That's doable! I have several G3 PowerBooks with 16GB with CFs and those cheap Chinese adapters, they work great on OS9 and OSX! I even have a couple SSDs (by KingSpec; their PATA II versions, their PATA version just runs slow). I just use the CFs because they are lower in cost, and I only use Name Brand CFs - SanDisk, Transcend, Kingston, Lexar. 

For a 133ATA, nothing faster than 200X will do nice because thats around the top maximum speed I find. You can put in a 400X but you wot see any improvement in speed over the 200X as per the limit of the interface itself. A 64GB CF/SSD would be nice on the G3. More than enough room for a basic OSX/OS9 dual boot machine, apps and your files.

God luck with that and have fun!

 

[rezwits]

Thanks man!  so 200X and I am good.  I posted over your in other post: https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/23406-booting-from-a-compact-flash-drive/

As not to hijack this thread!

Thanks again Elfen!

 

[Tempest]

What do you mean by a "In-line SCSI terminator"?

As for the amount of System 6 software, I'm really only talking about games.  I don't need application software (unless they augment games like that talking software).