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| Author | Large Hard drives and old hardware (Read 50462 times) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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bd1308
128 MB  Posts: 198  
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on: July 20, 2006, 01:24
Well, over the past few weeks I have been trying to experiment in stuffing a huge drive into my Powermac 5500. I tried both a 160GB drive and a 120GB drive, both apparently ATA/133. Both of these drives did not work, forming major data corruption only after a few boots from a fresh install of 7.6.1. I believe that ATA-6 drives (ATA/133) drives do not work with these older macintosh computers. Now the task is to find a ATA-100 drive in either a 80GB trim or a 120Gb trim and see if either may work in my machine. Now, this deficiency isnt apparent immediately, as the drives are FULLY recognized by the system. I think and believe that the ATA-6 incompatability is due to the lack of advanced error correction that early IDE controllers lacked (simply because it wasnt needed from drives with low platter densities) Stay tuned to this thread for further updates. b |
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dpaanlka
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1024 MB Posts: 1646
Reply #1 on: July 20, 2006, 02:32
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You may want to bring your ideal drive down to around 40gb.
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douglas
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32 MB Posts: 44
Reply #2 on: July 20, 2006, 02:38
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Would a different hard disk driver such as the one from "Hard Disk Toolkit" help? Douglas 
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bd1308
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128 MB Posts: 198
Reply #3 on: July 20, 2006, 02:52
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Actually, I think this is more of a Sonnet L2 G3 issue, since the corruption doesnt occur until the software is installed.
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RacerX
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32 MB Posts: 36
Reply #4 on: July 20, 2006, 03:37
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Quote from: "bd1308" Well, over the past few weeks I have been trying to experiment in stuffing a huge drive into my Powermac 5500... I think you are going to run into a lot of problems with large drives.. period. Back in the era of 7.6 a large drive was 4 GB and a massive drive would have been about 9 GB. And an insanely massive drive would have been 18 GB (and cost a small fortune). At that time HFS was reaching the limit of what it could deal with. Every HFS volume is divided into 65,536 allocation blocks. What does this mean? Well, lets look at some volume sizes to see what effect this has.
1 GB volume: 16k allocation block 4 GB volume: 64k allocation block 40 GB volume: 640k allocation block 80 GB volume: 1.25 MB allocation block 120 GB volume: 1.9 MB allocation block 160 GB volume: 2.5 MB allocation block And that is assuming that Macs made before 2003 could even deal with ATA/EIDE drives larger than 120 GB... which they can't. Throw in the fact that many early applications are also limited in what volume sizes they can comprehend (usually maxing out at either 2 GB or 4 GB) and you start to see some very strange behavior when forcing older software to work with newer volume sizes. These days I have been seeing an increasing number of these types of issues with people running software in Classic on newer Macs. Classic apps like QuarkXPress 4.x and Acrobat Distiller 5.x start having issues when they are being run off of volumes larger than 80 GB. For these I generally make either a 2 or 4 GB disk image for them to work off of to fix the issues. What this comes down to is... basically, putting System 7 on a large drive is at best a big waste of space and at worst a futile effort. I would stop at about 4.5 GB personally or partition anything larger into multiple 4 GB partitions (in the case of a 40 GB drive... that is 10 partitions!) to insure an efficient and stable environment for System 7.
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bd1308
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128 MB Posts: 198
Reply #5 on: July 20, 2006, 04:08
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I was aware of the HFS block sizes and knew about this when I was testing. The object of the test was to guage reliability not the presence of wasted space. Besides, most of the space I was goign to use was to be used on recorded TV shows and movies. I currently have a 40GB drive in the mac, and I think i'll stick with that. I *MAY* run 9.1 or something on my starmax 4000 and use a big drive there in order to store movies, but then again I migth as well just buy something to store that, or just bite the bullet and find a G3 mac all-in-one and/or run OS 8.6 or something on my 5500. Another thing was that I could actually save the recorded movies onto a CD-R, which would nullify this whole issue. b
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dpaanlka
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1024 MB Posts: 1646
Reply #6 on: July 20, 2006, 04:29
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The largest drive I've used with OS 7 as a single partition was 40gb. It worked perfectly fine, and it is about the max that anybody would need or try anyways. Currently my biggest drive is 10gb, and it is more than enough space for OS 7 stuff.
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RacerX
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32 MB Posts: 36
Reply #7 on: July 20, 2006, 04:34
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Quote from: "bd1308" I was aware of the HFS block sizes and knew about this when I was testing. Generally one would expect that the hardware limitation of older Macs (limiting the size of hard drives) would be more widely known than the limitations of HFS (which has been out of general use for more than 8 years now). So attempting to use a 160 GB drive makes one believe that the HFS limitations needed to be covered as well... specially as it seems that you didn't even attempt to partition the drive (with an OS partition of maybe 2 GB and a storage partition for the rest). Plus when you post a thread like this and don't bring up these issues, you are misleading people who don't know any better about what System 7 can and can't handle. Also it is hard to tell from your post what types of things you are attempting to do... for example you requested help with video capture but I couldn't figure out what hardware or software you were using. I could come up with a dozen reasons for your issues... but without clear information, it was easier to skip the thread all together rather than guess at what could be wrong. So, while we are on the subject... what are you using for capturing video? And I mean both hardware and software.
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bd1308
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128 MB Posts: 198
Reply #8 on: July 20, 2006, 07:12
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I think this is getting a tad out of hand. I did this as a test, not as a thread where I'm proclaiming that this can be done. Oh and FYI, it can be done. I'm using a 5500 right now with 8.5 on it and HFS+ and everything that I need. It's not a hardware issue. Two partitions, one for the OS (5GB) and one for storage (~100GB) But on OS 7, I ran into other issues not related to the drive. b
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dpaanlka
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1024 MB Posts: 1646
Reply #9 on: July 20, 2006, 08:07
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Hmm I'm not sure what to say on this topic. Not much is explaining why your system is crashing when the Sonnet extensions load, as all of my systems are fine with various Sonnet products. As you know bd1308, I've been on the side of smaller hard drives here.
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RacerX
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32 MB Posts: 36
Reply #10 on: July 20, 2006, 10:31
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Quote from: "bd1308" Oh and FYI, it can be done. If the drive is smaller than 120 GB and you are using HFS+, then I never said or even implied that it couldn't be done. But if this is a 160 GB drive then I strongly suggest not storing any thing of value on it... because eventually it'll go down. My feelings on this are that sure, you can get a whale in a bikini... but don't expect it to be sexy.
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bd1308
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128 MB Posts: 198
Reply #11 on: July 20, 2006, 16:00
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Well my contribution to this tread is done. If I cant lock it, I wont post in here until the final result of my experimentation is finalized.
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bd1308
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128 MB Posts: 198
Reply #12 on: July 20, 2006, 16:31
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Again, this isnt a issue of reliability at this point. This is a proof-of-concept experiment.
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bd1308
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128 MB Posts: 198
Reply #13 on: July 24, 2006, 06:55
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Besides having to restart to turn on/off the VM, this system has proven very reliable for me this far. I have the OS on a 7GB partition and my test data (music collection) on my 100GB+ partition, which is actually HFS+... I really need to figure out what happened with the 7.6.1 install and this setup, its not drive related, as the Original 2.0GB drive was used to install 7.6.1 on and it still ended up going south. I'll keep ya updated. Oh and I still wouldnt recommend this to the average person either, its still in very early testing phases. b
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JoAT
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32 MB Posts: 58 
Reply #14 on: July 24, 2006, 18:49
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I didn't think that 7.6 could see or use any data off of an HFS+ formatted drive. BTW, what OS version do you have on the other partition?
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