Re: How big can HDs for GS's be?

[spector@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article tyoung@jove.acs.unt.edu (Phillip "Ty" Young) writes...
>
>I found a neat FAQ at apple.archive.umich.edu dealing with SCSI drives 
>for the GS, skimmed it over pretty quickly, and believe that I read 
>something about the maximum sized HD you could use with a GS is about 
>48M...is this true?  I mean, am I wasting my $ if I get an 80?  Thanks
>TY 

	I think your confusing the limitations of the ProDOS filing system.
The maximum size ProDOS can format a device to is 32 megabytes, however,
you can create multiple "partitions" which the computer sees as many
individual hardrives. You can create about 12 ProDOS partition on the //e
or IIgs, so that becomes 32Mb x 12, or 384 megabytes. Does that mean the
largest hardrive your IIgs can use is 384Mb? No, there's another filing
system your GS can use...

	The other filing system is HFS (same as used on the Macintosh).
If your using System 6, you can format partitions on the hardrive as
HFS volumes (usually you'd want only one). Unlike ProDOS, HFS doesn't
have small size limits, so you can format HFS partitions up to a few
Gigabytes in size! You can of course mix ProDOS and HFS together, so you
could create a couple of 32Mb ProDOS partitions and one larger HFS parition.
Bottom line is, you need not worry about hardrive sizes, so long as your
using System 6.0.x. Take note though, while HFS has some advantages like
virtually unlimited partition sizes, and long filenames up to 31 characters,
it has some major drawbacks: 1) It's generally slower than ProDOS.
2) The larger your partition, the more space files "eat" up, no matter
what their size. 3) There are currently no HFS utilities available for
the IIgs, so you cannot undelete, repair or optimize. 4) ProDOS 8 programs
cannot recognize HFS partitions (ie. ProTERM, AppleWorks, ShrinkIt 8-bit),
nor can they be run from HFS (that includes GS-specific games which use
ProDOS 8 -- there are a few). IMO, it's #3 which is largest problem, but
hopefully someone out there is writing HFS utilities (or updating current
ProDOS ones, like ProSel-16! :) #1 is much less noticable if you have
an accelerator I hear, and #4 is the reason you'd want ProDOS partitions.
Drawback #2 can't be helped, even if using HFS on a Macintosh... 

I wouldn't not recommend using HFS, but think about the above limitions 
when creating partition sizes. It's a good idea to keep a good number
of ProDOS partitions (near as many as you can) and leave the rest as HFS.
(At least IMHO, and will probably setup my own hardrive like this, if
I ever get around to ordering one. ;-)

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>Ty Young, Teaching Fellow in Cello	          University of North Texas
>internet:  tyoung@jove.acs.unt.edu		           College of Music
>=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Mitchell Spector
sb_spec@pavo.concordia.ca / spector@vax2.concordia.ca