[G4] New hard drive question

[Ronald Steinke]

On 21 Jun, 2005, at 22:27, Harry Freeman wrote:

Most SATA drives have Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology  
(SMART) which makes them the most desirable drive now on the market.  
For more information about Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting  
Technology (SMART) see;  
http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/qual/ 
featuresSMART.html
Storage Review.

All this talk about SATA drives is not pertinent to the question of how  
to see the entire content of a large drive on his machine. I have seen  
that drives larger than 128Gb will not be recognized by the on-board  
bus unless you have a pretty new machine.

The work-around is to install a PCI IDE controller card like the Sonnet  
ATA 133 card. Those types of cards are capable of recognizing drives  
larger than the 128Gb limit of the factory controller. With a card like  
this, two or three additional drives can be installed and recognized  
without any problem.

Another method of seeing large drives is to use an external FireWire  
box. Drives of extremely large size will be automatically recognized  
through the FW connection.

As to the suggestion of partitioning a large drive - you don't need to  
partition because it is being recognized in its entirety if you use  
either a new controller or a FW box. The old reason for partitioning  
was that drives were divided into a finite number of sectors by the  
formatting software, I cannot recall the exact number of sectors, but  
it was the same number of sectors regardless of the capacity of the  
drive. By dividing the drive into a finite number of sectors, each  
sector would have a predetermined size which users could not alter. A  
4Gb drive might have sectors of 64kb each and a 20Gb drive would have  
sectors five times larger than that.

Only one file can be stored in each sector which could make wasted  
space. The larger drives could wind up storing small files in large  
sectors and waste space. (A very simplified explanation, I know.) A  
partitioned drive appeared to the formatting software as separate  
drives and each partition would be created with the same default number  
of sectors thereby making each sector smaller in capacity.  
Unfortunately, the size of the sector was still not able to be changed  
by the user.

With the advent of HFS-extended formatting, the sectors were limited in  
the number of kb each would occupy. I believe that the size is 5kb per  
sector, but don't take that as carved in stone. This method resulted in  
many more sectors than before being created on the drive. With many  
more and SMALLER sectors available, less space was being wasted by  
storing small files in large sectors. BUT, the size still cannot be  
modified by the user. I'm not convinced that the option of controlling  
the sector size is a good option for most users or not, so I accept  
what Apple has made available - HFS-extended formatting instead of  
HFS-standard.