Re: Dumb question: About a hard drive on a GS

[Mitchell Spector <mitch2gs@hotmail.com>]

<patglenn@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

>Sounds like I asked the wrong question.  Perhaps my question should have
>been:  What's the best way to put a hard drive on a GS?  Keeping in mind
>that I already have one on it, so at some time I must have had some idea
>what I was doing.

    When partitioning a IIgs hardisk, the best solution is to create as many
ProDOS partitions as possible (32 MB in size each), within reason, with
the remaining space set as one large HFS partition.

    Typically you'll want to stick with ProDOS, there are far too many issues
and limitations to use HFS as your core filing system on a IIgs hardrive.
I wrote up a list of HFS pros and cons to c.s.a2 some 7 years ago, I dug it
up from Google to help illustrate the point...

----
Pros: 

- Large partitions (up to 2+ Gigabytes in size) 
- Long descriptive filenames with few naming restrictions 

Cons: 

- Very slow for reading and writing (especially writes) 
- Incompatible with ProDOS 8 (and some GS/OS) applications 
- Not accessible from ProDOS 8 
- File allocation units increase with partition size 
- No IIgs HFS maintaince software (optimize, repair, undelete) 
- HFS.FST very buggy and unstable, corruption chances higher 
- Cannot boot from HFS partitions 
- Requires special (invisible) HFS driver to be read on Mac 
---
    Incidentally, just how many ProDOS parititions you decide to create are
heavily influenced by the controller card being used. When working with
a RamFAST SCSI, you have to remember you're limited to a maximum of
12 volumes across all your online devices (i.e. hardisk, CD-ROM, Zip drive).
With other controller cards, it becomes an issue of cluttering up the Finder
desktop with endless partitions icons. And outside of GS/OS, you'll probably
be prevented from accessing past the first 10-12 partitions because of the
way ProDOS-8 does its mapping.

    The size limitation of ProDOS (32 megabytes maximum) may seem very
restrictive these days where 200-300 Gigabyte drives are not uncommon,
but it's all relative. You can fit a _fair_ number of IIgs-specific software
and data files a single ProDOS partition with plenty of room to spare.
Compare that to a modern day machine, where a single user document 
file can typically fill up a whole ProDOS partition. :)

Mitchell Spector