Re: Largest HD on GS?

[nathan@cco.caltech.edu (Nathan Mates)]

In article <CLBoCu.1J5@news.direct.net>,
Elliot Abramowitz <elliota@indirect.com> wrote:
>I'm curious as to what the largest hard drive size is that I can put onto 
>a gs system using gs/os and still be able to reach all the files?  Is a 
>600meg drive possible? Also, someone recommened using HFS, what is he 
>talking about and should it be done??

   Theoretically, I think there's about a 4GB limit per drive partition, so
you don't have to really worry about a 600MB drive at all, except for the
following things. Here's a quick rundown on drives, formatting, and more:

- Hard Drived can be partitioned (electronically "split") into different
pieces. Why this is important will become clear in a moment.

- On each parition, the system has to have a way of storing the data on
disk. There are two formats you need to know about: ProDOS and HFS. ProDOS
is the same style of formatting as most 3.5" disks on the Apple II, some
5.25"s, and is the standard format for Apple IIs. HFS is the "Mac" style
of putting things on disks.

- Prodos and GS/OS volumes have a maximum size of 32MB. Your first volume
parition must be Prodos formatted to be able to boot off of the drive. 
Thanks to paritioning, you can make a whole bunch of 32MB drives; with
later versions of the RamFAST rom, you can have lots (at least 10) of
little paritions running around.

- There is maybe a 4GB limit on the size of a HFS volume. (I don't know
the exact details, but that's reasonable).

- The plusses of ProDOS volumes are: baing able to boot off them, faster
access than HFS, file/volume utilities, like undeleting and volume 
optimization with certain programs. (ProSEL-16 is the program of choice
for this). ProDOS volumes do have the problems of having the 15-char
limits on filenames, with no "illegal" chars like spaces, most punctuation,
and the like.

- The main advantage of HFS is that it allows really big volumes, and really
fun file names. Other than that, it's a little slower (maybe 10%) than
ProDOS volumes (even more of a difference w/o an accelerator card), and
older programs will not run from it. These older programs are "ProDOS 8"
programs, and are basically anything that will run on a Apple IIe or less,
and include such fun things as AppleSoft Basic, AppleWorks 1-4, ProTERM,
and some other things. Files on a HFS partition are not accessible from
ProDOS 8, so you cannot store either ProDOS 8 applications, or any files
you want to be able to read from ProDOS 8 apps.

What this means for you is that you should probably have a bunch of 32MB
ProDOS partitions running around, and then one big HFS partition at the
end for all of the GS-Specific stuff. Here's how my 240MB drive is organized

Partition #  Format/Size      Descr
1            ProDOS,20MB      Boot volume and ProDOS 8 gunk
2            ProDOS,32MB      Programming and work utils (Orca, Gno, Genesys)
3            ProDOS,32MB      Games #1
4            ProDOS,32MB      Games #2
5            ProDOS,32MB      Sound & music
6            HFS, 88MB (or so) TrueType Fonts, GS/OS Apps, downloads, etc.

   You may want to make fewer or more ProDOS partitions depending on how
much stuff you want; only about 12 can be accessed from ProDOS 8 at once.

   After all of these warnings and the like, you'll still need to set up
your drive once you get it. If you have a IDE drive, or a Apple SCSI card,
you'll have to use Apple's Advanced Disk Utils program (get the one that's
part of system 6.0 or 6.0.1) to partition the drive. If you have a RamFAST
SCSI card, make sure it's a recent Rom (3.0 or later). Then, as soon as you
plug in the drive (do this with the power off and all the usual warnings),
and turn the computer on, the RamFAST will ask you how you would like it
partitioned, and you'll have to go through its text-based setup stuff.


   Well, this is enough warnings and all; in short, it's very much
possible to put a 600MB drive on a GS.



Nathan Mates