Re: //gs advice needed

[cmcurtin@r-node.io.org (C Matthew Curtin)]

jheath@HALCYON.COM (Jay S. Heath) writes:

>Greetings from a Seattle based Macintosh user.  I need some information and
>advice from the //gs gurus who read this newsgroup.

What? A posting from a Mac user who doesn't want to rag on us for using
superior machines? ;-)

>I know that she needs a SCSI card and a SCSI drive. Until the first time I
>looked in this newsgroup I assumed that she needs an external hard drive.
>But I saw an ad in .marketplace for a //gs with an internal drive.  So, if
>this is true, the question is, what kind of internal drive is installable
>in a //gs?  Physical size? Brackets required? Extra cooling needed?
>Anything else I need to know?  Any serious drawbacks to an internal drive
>in a //gs?

IDE cards and drives are also available; they are cheaper by comparison
to SCSI drives, so this might be an option. (I'm not familiar enough with
either IDE or SCSI to talk about which is "better".)

>Is there a maximum drive size (MB) that //gs can access? Is there a
>consensus on what is a good size? She is in college and will be using the
>drive mostly for WP and humanities classes subjects. No graphics or other
>major disk hogs. I was thinking 60-80MB as a good size.

The limit for a single ProDOS partition is 32 mb. System 6 allows one to 
use the Mac's hierarchial filesystem, whose limit is much larger than anyone
in 1993 is likely to use. Some considerations for going this route:
	1. GS/OS must be booted from a ProDOS partition (so at least one
	   partition must be in the ProDOS filesystem).
	2. 8-bit software must live on a ProDOS partition; it cannot
	   work on an HFS partition.
	   Further, 8-bit software (i.e., //e stuff) will not be able to
	   data that lives on an HFS partition.
	3. If you're just using 16-bit (i.e., IIgs specific) software 
	   that is written correctly, there won't be any problems associated
	   with the differences between HFS and ProDOS' FS.

Because I don't see a need for having 93 different volumes online, and 
I use GS-only software almost exclusively, having a 32mb boot parition
(which contains all the OS extensions, Inits, etc, that I could ever want,
and the three our four serious 8-bit apps that I use) and having the rest
allocated for a HFS partition is not a problem for me. Other users will
no doubt have different preferences, and different experiences than I...

>And...Is there a place for a used //gs SCSI card? I know where to get a new
>one here in Seattle, but only at full list. 

Try a mail order house listed in II Alive, GS+, or any other II mag. I
don't have one handy :-(

>Also, ROM.  Is an upgrade possible? Practical?

Possible, yes. Only get one if you have a ROM 00.

>I appreciate your assistance.  Please reply directly to jheath@halcyon.com.

Oops. :-)

-- 
C. Matthew Curtin        IEEE Computer Society member       Apple II Forever!
PO Box 27081                  Support Shareware                GNO your IIgs!
Columbus, OH 43227-0081    cmc@brandx.cs.ohiou.edu            cmcurtin@io.org