[CUBE] Yes It Works! Anyone try a larger drive than 120 GB in a cube?

[Kunga]

On Wednesday, June 11, 2003, at 09:01  AM, Rod Clifford wrote:
> Question regarding the concept of partitioning:
> The sysyem is kept on its own partition it seems. Startup disk still 
> works the same in the control panel? As updates & patches are released 
> there are no special requirements to install on that partition?

Everything works exactly the same in the startup disk Control 
Panel/System Preference. Nothing special. No patches. Where did you get 
that idea? You put OS X on it's own FIRST partition and OS 9.2.2 on 
it's own SECOND partition to keep them from commingling.

> Silly question: is the reason for partitioning a performance gain or 
> to keep the individual partitions from fragmenting as quickly? As with 
> most Mac owners, I dump everything on a single partitioned hard drive.

Exactly. Both and HD longevity. By having dedicated OS X and OS 9.2.2 
partitions, they remain confined to their assigned spaces and fragment 
much less than they would across a huge unpartitioned HD. X also uses 
the empty space on it's partition for all the invisible OS X swap files 
which can get quite large. The main thing is to CONFINE OS X to a 
limited but large enough first partition so the system doesn't become 
scattered all over the entire drive and cause the HD head to be racing 
all over the place for system parts as it gets more and more fragmented 
with every system update and addition. Such wild system parts 
over-searching can reduce the lifetime of the HD as the mechanical head 
must do much more work to keep track of all the system parts scattered 
hither and yon.

I was out of space on my WD 100 inside and had only dedicated an 8GB 
partition for OS X. This turned out to be much too small. It was at 
more than 7GB before building up swap files and would sometimes get as 
big as all but 20MB of space left when its performance would collapse. 
I had to do something and that's when Nic's message from Italy came in. 
I was about to put in a new 120 when Nic mentioned that his friend had 
told him about the partition size loophole and I simply put the 250 in 
instead. Have no fear, just make 4 partitions with Dick Utility and 
your 180 will do quite nicely inside your Cube. Make sure you invoke 
the "Install Mac OS 9 Drivers" option so you will see all of them in OS 
9 as well as in OS X.

k

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