[G4] Partitioning ?

[Harry Freeman]

Best Regards, /\*_*/\

> On Aug 9, 2005, at 12:15 AM, Michael Danieals wrote:
>
>   Mostly the only reason you would Partition a drive Dan, was to brake 
> down a 100gig drive, for example, to four 25gig drives. This was 
> useful when only one computer was in the house hold. Also, IMHO it's a 
> carry over from when you were limited to only 2-4gigs on any drive 
> because it was all the system could handel, so you had to partition a 
> 10gig drive so you could use it all.
>
> You can partition any hard drive if you want too, but the fast home 
> use drives of today don't realy need it unless the system is used by 
> two or more in a household, then it makes good sense, most times.
>
>          Michael
>
> From: Dan A Currie <dancurr at frontiernet.net>
> Reply-To: "A place to discuss Apple's G4 computers." 
> <g4 at listserver.themacintoshguy.com>
> To: "A place to discuss Apple's G4 computers." 
> <g4 at listserver.themacintoshguy.com>
> Subject: [G4] Partitioning ?
> Date: Thu, 04 Aug 2005 20:38:31 -0500
>
> Hello All,
>
> Has anyone here used partition on their G4 HD and if so what was the 
> result?
>
> TIA,
>
> Dan
> _______________________________________________

Greetings ( + )!( + )
The main reason to partition large drives was because Mac HFS file 
system the Allocation block size increased as the disk capacity 
increased.

 From http://www.wap.org/journal/macos81.html

If an HFS volume can have no more than 65,000 blocks, what happens when 
you start using larger and larger drives? The answer is: the allocation 
block size increases. To ridiculous extremes:

Size of drive						Allocation block size
32 megabytes					512 bytes
64 megabytes					1024 bytes
128 megabytes					2048 bytes
256 megabytes					4096 bytes
512 megabytes					8192 bytes
1024 megabytes					16,384 bytes
4 billion bytes						65,536 bytes

On a four billion byte drive (about average in 1998), saving a document 
consisting of a single character, say the letter "a," will consume just 
one byte. But the hard drive must allocate a block capable of holding 
65,536 bytes to hold that one byte -- a huge waste. Many Macintosh 
files actually come in two parts, a "data fork" and a "resource fork." 
Without going into detail as to what these terms mean, in practice it 
is possible to store a single file (from the user's point of view) that 
is, say, 200 bytes in size, but with a data fork and a resource fork. 
Since the forks must be stored separately, this means that this 200 
byte file could actually end up using 131,072 bytes of disk space. If 
the user also wanted to give the file a spiffy custom color icon, this 
must be stored separately, too, meaning there would be three blocks 
consumed, for a total of 196,608 bytes of disk space -- all to store 
this 200 byte file.

Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS_Plus

When Apple introduce the HFS+ file system this problem was temporarily 
solved, however as the drives become larger and larger the block size 
is once again on the increase.

An analogy is that you are storing you socks in a drawer however you 
can only store one pair of socks in each drawer even though there is 
room in the drawer to hold 120 pair of socks.




Harry (*^_^*)
? We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing 
through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love... 
and then we return home.
Australian Aboriginal proverb