Re: Help with HD for Apple //e

[David Phillips <David_Phillips@nexus.amaq.org.au>]

On 9/16/99 10:49 AM, obsbedia2 wrote:

>	 When hard drives first came out for Apple IIs, there was at least one 
>company
>that wouldn't sell Apple II owners a large hard drive because they 
>couldn't
>use/format it.  //e users are still limited to 32Megs per volume and a 
>total of
>14 volumes on line at once.  In regard to SCSI drives, I have a 160Meg 
>External
>SCSI partitioned into 4 32Meg partitions (128Megs total).  I think that 
>you
>could get around the 4 partition limit if you used a RAMFAST card, but I
>haven't tried it yet.  
>
>	I do like the FOCUS IDE hard drives because they're fast and easy to 
>move
>around.  What are you using for a program launcher?  That's been the 
>real
>limiting factor on my IIe.  My favorite GUI desktop will only recognize 
>10
>volumes, so I have 2 5.25" drives, one 3.5 and seven partitions on the 
>FOCUS.
>
>	By the way, the external hard drives are really nice in the classroom 
>because
>they don't care if the students turn the computers off and on too 
>quickly
>(separate power supply), whereas a FOCUS internal hard drive wouldn't 
>have a
>chance to properly park the head and problems would develop quickly.


I have  a i gig on my IIGS To get around the problem of #@ meg partitions I
have a couple of 32 meg partitions with the last one being a large HFS
partition. 

The only problem is that when you wish to use thed file you have to copy it
to one of the 'normal' partitions or to a RAM disk (which I use-1 meg RAM
card).

This partition being a HFS partition is forgiving of names - you can use Mac
style names. but you have to change it before transfering to the ProDOS
partition.

In the matter of the Head park. In all but the oldest hard drives this is not
a problem as they all now have auto-park ... as the platter speed slows the
head auto-parks. I have worked on hard drives changing platters and sometimes
getting broken drives to work again and I have seen this auto-park.

I have not worked on a IDE drive but I would assume they have the same
feature. anyone out there now for sure about this.


David Phillips
Vice President/Secretary
Apple Macintosh Association of QLD
Brisbane Australia