Re: Hard Drives for Apple //c+

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

In article <CyD7pt.47y@cs.dal.ca>,
Tony Cianfaglione <ab616@cfn.cs.dal.ca> wrote:
> 
>      The biggest setback with the IIc/IIc+ when it comes to hard drives 
> is the fact that ProDOS only recognizes 32 meg in each partition and 
> you're limited to 4 drives on the Smartport, not counting the 5.25 external.

With ProDOS-8 2.0 and later, more than 4 SmartPort devices are
supported, provided the IIc SmartPort firmware can handle it (I didn't
see any mention of a specific limit in a quick look at the Technical
Reference manual).

Say you had a UniDisk 3.5 and a large hard drive.  The UniDisk would
appear as S5,D1.  The first hard drive partition would be S5,D2.
Subsequent partitions will be remapped to unused slot/drive numbers,
starting with slot 1.  Assuming you have the IIc with RAM disk support
firmware (ROM version 3, 4 or 5=IIc+), a maximum of 9 SmartPort
devices would be possible (using slots 1, 2, 4, 5 and S3,D1).  With
IIc ROM version 0 (the first version supporting the UniDisk 3.5; the
version after the original IIc ROM), slot 7 could also be used, for a
total of 11 SmartPort devices.

There is then the problem of partitioning the drive: I've never seen
the software used by the Chinook SmartPort drives, so I don't know
what it provides in the way of partitioning software.  If it is
similar to Chinook SCSI Utilities (for Apple SCSI cards), it should
support up to 9 partitions.

The theoretical limit would therefore be 32 MB x 9 = 288 MB.

> GS/OS allows 8 Smartport devices and has no limit that I know of in
> megs on a hard drive. 

Where did you get the 8 device limit from?  The only limit on
SmartPort devices on a IIgs is related to physical limits of the drive
connector: no more than six drives may be connected to the IIgs disk
port.

The Apple High-speed SCSI card supports up to 111 partitions/devices
over all hard drives, CD-ROMs, etc.  GS/OS may be limited to 64 hard
drive partitions in total.

The original Apple SCSI card only supports 7 partitions/devices.
-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand