lukpac..
if u have partitioned the 4tb drive only utilizing the first 2TB of space then yes, u are safe from data corruption... but
u are losing 50% of the capacity of the drive... which i wouldnt be ok with. especially given the price of a 4tb vs a 2tb drive.. even if i was given one for free, i wouldnt be satisfied with having a 4tb drive only 50% utilized
re: "physical limit" this was a poor choice of words on my part.. what i meant was the "real limit"
is due to APM partitioning.. by saying physical i was trying to illustrate that it is indeed a barrier that you simply cannot get around... this is why i compared this to the 4gb limit of 32bit windows systems... there is simply no way around this.
from my research my conclusion is...
2.2TB is the absolute largest size that can be assigned to a single hard drive device usable within the mac os 9 operating system. and also the largest
you can assign to a multi-disk RAID partition aswell (either via hardware raid controller or SOFTRAID)
GUID partitions are able to surpass this size in addressable space but are only supported on mac os x 10.4 and higher. PowerPC based Macs that are running OS X 10.4 or later can mount and use a drive formatted with the GUID Partition Table, but cannot boot from the devicethe only way around this "2.2TB limit per drive device" rule is to
install the drive into a server of some sort and share the drive via AFP as a network drive... i have tested this personally with a RAID array of 4 1TB disks, in a software ZFS RAID5 formation, with a capacity of 3.68TB and am fairly certain that i had more then 2.2TB of data on this drive.. and its performance was very satisfactory, and the experience of using the drive, felt the same as using a local drive. there were no pauses or wait times. Using it over gigabit ethernet w/ AFP i think its arguable that its faster then firewire 400...but this may have been because the raid array had 4 disks and read + wrote data very fast compared to a single drive connected via firewire.
i think that lukpac was just sharing his experience for the benefit of others.. we often get in the routine of answering peoples questions.. we must remember not everyone is 'asking for help' but merely 'contributing information to help the cause'
