home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Path: sparky!uunet!usc!wupost!waikato.ac.nz!comp.vuw.ac.nz!actrix!Bruce.Hoult
- Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
- Subject: Re: Large disks -> large block sizes?
- Message-ID: <1992Aug12.065305.13846@actrix.gen.nz>
- From: Bruce.Hoult@bbs.actrix.gen.nz
- Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 06:53:05 GMT
- Sender: Bruce.Hoult@actrix.gen.nz (Bruce Hoult)
- References: <2978@accucx.cc.ruu.nl>
- Organization: Actrix Information Exchange
- Lines: 30
-
- In article <2978@accucx.cc.ruu.nl> creon@accucx.UUCP (M.Voswinkel.) writes:
- > Hi all.
- >
- > We just connected a 1.3GB hard disk to a Mac, to find
- > that the minimum file size is 21k. The disk was formatted
- > with silverlining.
- >
- > Is this a limitation of the Mac OS or just a problem with
- > silverlining? Does anyone know of a formatting utility that
- > allows for smaller block sizes?
-
- It's a limitation. Apple managed to avoid the 32 MB volume size limit that
- MS-DOS had, but they fell into another trap and HFS can only support 65536
- allocation blocks per disk volume.
-
- That means that as disks get larger, the minimum size for files goes
- up at the same time -- divide 1.3 GB by 65536 and you get 21299 bytes
- per allocation block, which gets rounded up to the next 512 byte
- multiple, i.e. 21504 bytes.
-
- The way to avoid this is to split your large drive into several partitions,
- and put your smallest files in the smallest partition.
-
- -- Bruce
-
- --
- Bruce.Hoult@bbs.actrix.gen.nz Twisted pair: +64 4 477 2116
- BIX: brucehoult Last Resort: PO Box 4145 Wellington, NZ
- "Cray's producing a 500 MIPS personal computer with 256MB RAM and 8 GB
- hard disk that fits in your pocket!" "Great! Is it PC compatible?"
-