🚀 go-pugleaf

It is my understanding that any size is possible under the older (pre OS 8)
OS's as long as you partition the drive into 2GB partitions. Correct me if I'm
wrong as I'm always willing to learn

Matthew Pritzker wrote:

> 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).