I am planning on using a large and quiet IDE drive (such as a samsung spinpoint 40/80gig) with an ide-scsi converter in a SE/30. Are there any reasons why this wouldn't work?
Additionally, are there any limitations on the size of hard drives used in 68k macs?
the only problem with this is what os you are using. see list of max harddrive space with different mac oses
http://www.jagshouse.com/hard_drive_size.html
Well 7.X most likely.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that 2gb volume size limitation is on the partition size & not related to the physical size of the drive (e.g you could have multiple partitions less or equal to 2gb).
What I'm after is the largest hard drive that will actually physically work with 68k macs. For instance - I'd imagine drives which require 24bit addressing (320Gigs I think), wouldn't.
If you're just talking about what the hardware supports, I don't believe there's any limit "because SCSI is awesome". Get a good working IDE-SCSI adaptor and start plugging those 500GB drives in, but don't expect them to work except under *NIX.
If we're talking about MacOS, though, the picture is a little different.
68k Macs that support SCSI Manager 4.3 support "large partitions" under 7.5.5. What "large" means isn't ever explicitly stated to the best of my recollection, but I remember the figure 2TB being tossed around. I'd guess the actual figure is smaller than that but larger than you can buy a hard drive, even today. This is still assuming your SCSI-IDE adaptor works right. I'd be very interested in getting an 840AV and trying it out with the largest drive I could find--in the name of science. Expect block sizes on a hundred-gigabyte HFS drive to be around a megabyte, or maybe bigger.
68k Macs that don't support SCSI Manager 4.3 support 4GB partitions in System 7.5.5. IIRC, the MacOS supports 31 volumes mounted at once, so 31*4 would be the number of gigabytes you could address without SCSI Manager 4.3 and with 7.5.5.
System 7.1 and lower only support 2GB volumes, and I believe they have the same limit on concurrent mounts, so 31*2 would be the number of gigabytes you could address in 7.1 and lower.
I don't believe anyone has every actually tried these limits out, so if you want to, that'd be awesome. Let us know what you find--I'm certainly interested.
I wouldn't be in the least suprised if 500+ GB drives worked just fine under, say NetBSD or Linux.
I've got some friends that run a computer store, so if I ever get my hands on a good (48-bit LBA) IDE-SCSI adaptor, I'll borrow the largest IDE drive they have and try it out with various 68k Macs.
I wonder if you can get Linux booted and toally ignore the MacOS limits with something like EMILE. I haven't checked into it's limits, but it creates a custom HFS boot sector to bootstrap Linxu without MacOS. It's the kinda thing we've been needed for about a decade.
If it works with big drives, all the better.
just to comment, ive had a 2.7gb scsi drive at one point in time running 7.5.1 im not sure if that helps much but i didnt have to partition it either. figured i'd throw that out there...