🚀 go-pugleaf

Thank you all for your help. I'm currently running OS 8.6 so the 2 GB volume
limitation isn't an issue (particularly given that the 5500/250 came out
with a 4 GB internal disk as standard) I also partition my disks down to
about 1 GB each so the block sizes shouldn't be a problem either. Thank you
all again for your help.

Cheers,

Ben
================================
PowerMac 5500/250MHz/96MB RAM/OS8.6
http://BenManton.go.to
mailto:BenManton@go.to
================================

Matthew Pritzker, using mpritzke@home.com, felt an overwhelming urge to
share the following insight with the group:

> DucST4 wrote:
>> 
>> Is there any limit to the size of a HDD connected to a PowerMac 5500/250?
>> And does the interface make the answer any different? (ie: Internal,
>> external, SCSI or ATA)
> 
> The limits imposed are those of the filesystem (eg, software), not the
> hardware.  Version of MacOS prior to 8.1 are limited to the HFS
> filesystem, which is limited to 65535 allocation blocks.  With 7.5.3
> through 8.0, at least the restriction on block-size is quite loose-- up
> to 16MB per block, IIRC, so that works out to 1TB per volume.  Apple's
> partition map I think allows up to 16 partitions per physical drive, so
> those old systems max out at 16TB per drive.
> 
> Starting with MacOS 8.1 Apple added support for the HFS+ filesystem,
> which supports up to 8 billion allocation blocks, each up to 2GB in
> size, for a maximum partition size of 8 exabytes (8 billion GB).
> 
> Given that the largest single drive currently being manufactured is only
> 80GB, I think we can safely conclude that there isn't any PRACTICAL
> limit, except that HFS is quite wasteful on large volumes (each alias
> and folder icon-- as well as any other file-- takes up at least one
> allocation block).