Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[MacTron]

... 9.2.2 shoudl support drives up to 6 TB...

in what this statement is based ?
... oficial Apple info, real world tests, your test, or it is just a personal conviction...

can os 9 see a GPT partitioned drive?

No, it can't.

I haven't tested it by my self (by now...), But there is several statements on the internet, saying:
"... Windows XP, Mac OS 9, or any other system incapable of comprehending GPT Partitions"

[IIO]

OK... step 1... As stated above...

yeah, thats probably the reason for the confusion, apple makes these notes and has the ATA controllers in the OS9 computers in mind. so while 6 tera might be true for SCSI or firewire, it is prolly not for ATA.

what i interesting here is that this 2 tera limit of OS 9.2.2 has survived since OS 7.5, which also could make use of 2 TB drives already.

now i am curious if someone gets bigger disks to work using the SATA-150 solution from sonnet. myself i also only have 1.5 tb disks in my macs, just like you.

[supernova777]

there is an exception:
windows xp x64 edition can use GPT disks
https://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/guid_partition_table.mspx?mfr=true

GPT disks are supported only by Windows XP 64-Bit Edition. You cannot move GPT disks to computers running the 32-bit versions of Windows XP.

so for whatever reason it seems GPT happens to be compatible with every major 64 bit os + not compatible with any 32bit os..

another good point to note:

You cannot use the GPT partitioning style on removable media, detachable disks that use universal serial bus (USB) or IEEE 1394 (also called FireWire) interfaces, or on cluster disks that are connected to shared SCSI or Fibre Channel buses used by the Cluster service.

any usb/firewire disks cannot be formatted to GPT?? perhaps this is relative only to windows..

IIO: why do u bother to ramble on without checking any of the facts that u say???
seriously.. u do this EVERY post.. u just type a few quick sentences... u dont check if anything u say is true..
"stop talking out of your ass" as we would say in north america.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=talking%20out%20of%20your%20ass

[MacTron]

http://classroom.synonym.com/size-limitation-hfs-format-hard-drive-15364.html

HFS Volume Limitations
HFS can allocate logical volumes on storage devices as large as 2TB.

Computer users can work around the maximum volume sizes by creating several HFS volumes on the same storage device.

It is confusing again ...

A logical volume is an allocation of physical space as a unit on a storage device. HFS volume size limits are also limited by the computer's operating system. Mac OS 6 and 7 computers can only address HFS volumes as large as 2GB and OS 7.5 bumped the capacity to 4GB. As of the OS 7.5.2 revision, all Mac computers can address HFS volumes of up to 2TB in size.

Apple's HFS+ is designed to replace HFS on modern hard drives extending into the terabyte and beyond storage range. HFS+ can store up to 2.1 billion individual files and folders on a single volume. Additionally, HFS+ supports massive maximum volume and file sizes extending up to 8 extabytes. However, the maximum volume and file sizes are limited by operating system version: OS 10 has a cap of 2TB, OS 10.2 increased the cap to 8TB, OS 10.3 can address up to 16TB and OS 10.4 can use the full 8EB.

[supernova777]

yes hfs+ on A GTP partitioned drive can be up to 8 exobytes or whatever..

hfs+ on an APM partitioned drive is a different story apparently.

the article i quoted above said u can do this on a disk larger then 2.2tb + it will 'appear to work..'
but then once the actual data goes over 2.2tb 'all hell will break loose'

so this 'workaround' by doing 'multiple volumes' is not something u want to try unless your data is not important because the main problem is at the partition table level.. so even tho it can support huge filesystems.. the powerpc "APM" partition map cannot.

its easiest to say STAY at 2TB OR UNDER physical disk sizes + all is ok.. and keep focused on music;)
instead of being your own techsupport personnell

we should be happy mac os 9 works with 2TB even..

[DieHard]

but thats meaningless if the *PARTITION TABLE*
that is the parent container of that *FILESYSTEM* has its own limitation:
APM apple partition map is limited to 2.2TB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
am i invisible??
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4259534
u can create disks larger then 2.2tb with the apple raid controller
for example, making a raid from 2 x 2TB drives will give u a 4tb drive

Yes Chris, you are totally right (and not invisible)... but, I just wanted to add...

When we are talking PowerPC Macs... we are talking APM and thus the 2.2 partition limit... Apple Partition Map (APM) is a partition scheme used to define the low-level organization of data on disks formatted for use with 68k and PowerPC Macintosh computers. It was introduced with the Macintosh II.

Now a quick note on my Mac Pro, I have it setup mirrored (RAID 1) since I like the protection, so I am stuck with a 2 TB limit, I would never stripe them the RAID 0 (too risky for my project backups)... so I cannot get 4 GB... but I can go with 4 (2) TB Drives (2 mirrored sets) = 4 TB

or use RAID 5 with 4 drives and get (2.64 X 2 TB) and get 5.28 TB

As far as Intel macs we are talking GUID (GPT) and no more 2.2 TB limit like you explained 

[MacTron]

its easiest to say STAY at 2TB OR UNDER physical disk sizes + all is ok.. and keep focused on music;)
instead of being your own techsupport personnell

we should be happy mac os 9 works with 2TB even..

Yes this is the best recommendation for everyone.
Even more, we should use the DieHard partition advice for further security:

...
Any volumes above the 200GB limit may be a real hassle if they become corrupted or need of a defragmentation
...
so that was the original reason that I suggested all volumes be 190GB or less
...
Most of organize our data into folders, so the additional hierarchy of Volumes seems nice and logical... a Samples Volume (190 GB should be enough for most users), Mac OS (OS & apps), Audio Projects 1, 2, 3... it does not seem unfeasible...

[supernova777]

i find it strange to read that the mac pro raid card would have a limit of 2.2TB as this is obviously a card for intel/guid booting machine.... and its a pci-express card?
anyway i cant find any reason technically for this 2.2TB limit to be imposed on this card (other than the APM limit.. which i find funny that this fact isnt more prominently documented by apple)
makes me think that this is a false limitation somehow imposed by the manufacturer (apple)
perhaps so they can sell u another raid card in a few years time

im not right;) i just post what i look up online.. untill this topic was posted i had no clue of any of this.. so..
at least i know how to avoid problems in the future should my storage needs increase.

[IIO]

It is confusing again ...

this is the only thing i understand ... and which is even clear on old apple pages.

this file system supports this maximum volume size. (that is not neccessarily correct, since it is from the interwebz – but it is pretty clear what is meant.)

the 6 tera info .. pretty sure it was from apple, too. but i just looked, and i cant find it back. there is only info for the new max sizes introduced with 7.5.2 and for 10.2+

p.s. the problem with 1.5 gb disks is that mine are all full.

[IIO]

oh btw, just to make the contradictions complete, firmtek always claimed that their 4-port cards will also boot into OS9, while sonnet says it is impossible.

[lukpac]

I've read and re-read this thread a few times, and have also played around with things a bit, so I think I understand everything, but let me just put out my situation in case I've missed anything.

I've got a G4 MDD dual 1.25 GHz, which is running 9.2.2 (primarily) and 10.3.9. Mostly used for ProTools and some other older audio apps. I had an 80 GB drive on the ATA/66 controller and a 500 GB drive on the ATA/100 controller, split into 3 partitions. Unfortunately, those drives are now full.

I purchased a new 4 TB drive along with a PATA/SATA adapter to connect it to the ATA/100 controller. Long story short:

- Both OS9 and OSX seem to see the full capacity of the drive itself at a hardware level.
- OSX attempts to partition the entire drive, but 1) any partitions that extend beyond about 2 TB don't get created correctly and don't mount, and 2) no partitions show up at all in OS9.
- Drive Setup (2.1) in OS9 seems to only attempt to partition the first ~2 TB. I created one ~100 GB partition for booting, and planned on having one ~1.9 TB partition for data, but oddly enough, while this worked fine in OS9, OSX wasn't mounting the data partition. When I split the data area into two partitions, everything seems fine.

So now, I have the following setup:

- 103.64 GB (boot)
- 972.09 GB (data 1)
- 972.09 GB (data 2)

To confirm, 1) APM is necessary to use the drive in OS9, and 2) APM has a limit of ~2 TB across all partitions. Which limits any *drive* to ~2 TB. Correct?

"As we can see, APM is restricted to 32 bits worth of blocks which will limit the total disk size to 2 terabytes."

http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.23/23.03/APMtoGPT/index.html

I'd rather not waste half of the space available on the hard drive if I don't have to, but if that's the way it is, I guess that's the way it is.

BTW, Drive Setup 2.1 clearly wasn't designed with such large drives in mind. The partition size shown often seems to be incorrect, and typing in a number usually doesn't work. And dragging the partitions around sometimes works...until it basically decides to reset everything. Thankfully I managed to figure out a way to (eventually) get everything sized the way I wanted it.

[DieHard]

I purchased a new 4 TB drive along with a PATA/SATA adapter to connect it to the ATA/100 controller

You should try to explore SATA solutions under OS 9 / OS X (see the many posts by Chris & Mactron); a drive of this size with speed/cache/etc. will be seriously hindered with the PATA/SATA adapter on the internal bus.  As far as the size and the partitions, remember, this is new territory for OS 9.  I know you mentioned your 500GB was full, but as you know you can go up to (4) 500 GBs internally, which all connect to the internal controllers if your setup does not permit the addition on an SATA card; lastly, we posted some awesome solutions for FireWire with RAID in really small enclosures the take 2 laptop hard drives, so that you can move finished products to the RAIDed backup and free up internal drives.

[lukpac]

I purchased a new 4 TB drive along with a PATA/SATA adapter to connect it to the ATA/100 controller

You should try to explore SATA solutions under OS 9 / OS X (see the many posts by Chris & Mactron); a drive of this size with speed/cache/etc. will be seriously hindered with the PATA/SATA adapter on the internal bus.  As far as the size and the partitions, remember, this is new territory for OS 9.  I know you mentioned your 500GB was full, but as you know you can go up to (4) 500 GBs internally, which all connect to the internal controllers if your setup does not permit the addition on an SATA card; lastly, we posted some awesome solutions for FireWire with RAID in really small enclosures the take 2 laptop hard drives, so that you can move finished products to the RAIDed backup and free up internal drives.

From what I've read here and elsewhere, SATA cards are limited by the speed of the PCI bus, and that the ATA/100 controller should be roughly similar in speed. And the PATA/SATA adapter was about $5, vs. maybe $80 for a SATA PCI card. Hence the decision to go with the adapter.

Unless I'm mistaken, only the ATA/100 controller supports 48-bit LBA, which means the ATA/66 controller (besides being slower) can only address up to 137 GB. And actually, from what I've seen, it won't even recognize larger drives. I'd have to check myself, but I seem to recall that being the case. So that would mean it's only possible to have 2 "large" drives internally if one only uses the internal controllers.

[IIO]

it will recognize bigger drives, but you can only create partitions of 137 gb with such a controller.

however, this means that if you use e.g. a G4 QS 733, and you dont dont want to trust the software solutions for larger drive support with this controller, a PCI is the only option.

and when i need a PCI card anyway, it is worth thinking about SATA. that it is not much faster than ATA 100 might be true, but it is hmm, "more modern", and allows you to use at least some of the SATA-150 or even SATA-300 functionality/commands. (for example i would not like to connect a BD burner to an IDE controller via adapter.)

and, of course, when you want to connect more than 2 modern SATA HDs you will need a PCI solution in addition anyway.

[lukpac]

it will recognize bigger drives, but you can only create partitions of 137 gb with such a controller.

Are you sure about that? My understanding is without 48-bit LBA, the controller can't physically address the drive. The partition limit would be based on the filesystem and partition scheme, not the controller.

I can verify later regardless.

[supernova777]

hey there lukpac
yep i would take the 4tb back if u could and exchange it for a 2tb drive which is the max u can use with powerpc computers

as noted even if it appears to work.. it was said that once u get to a filled capacity u will experience data corruption or data loss and u will lose data + the drive will screw up etc

this is a physical limit much like the whole 4gb ram barrier of 32bit windows xp ..it just wasnt built to address more then that.. etc if u are using an MDD dual 1.25ghz + a pata adapter u should be ok having it connecte to the aTA100 port.. that is the port next to the cpu on the far right side of the motherboard when viewing it from the side door opening towards u.. which would mean u would probably need the drive installed in that drive carrier near the port on the right side aswell..

heres the deal..
if the drive is just a storage drive...(not a system boot drive)
then u can use it with mac os x using a GPT partition..
im not sure if mac os 9 will recognize GPT partitions as i have not tested this myself.
but i would guess that it doesnt?? if i had to guess.. but i could be wrong.
if the drive is formatted GPT partition type then it can be larger then 2.2TB and u can
get the full capacity of the drive...

for me personally.. to fix a problem like this. i would just move the drive to a server that runs mac os X (intel)
or Unix/FreeBSD (nas4free/FreeNAS).. or 64bit Intel + share the drive using AFP somehow and access the drive over the network.. and voila problem solved... over gigabit ethernet u get speeds of like 70-100MB/s over AFP.

if the drive is used for the system to boot. then u are indeed
limited to 2.2TB in size by the technology of APM.. which is 100% neeeded to boot any powerpc computer.. be it mac os X or mac os 9... if booting mac os 9, best to be on the safe side and keep any bootable partition lower then 137GB.. i would say cap it at 128gb. which is plenty for mac os 9...

has anyone done any experiments with APM partitioned drive larger then 137gb to boot mac os 9?

[supernova777]

wait u said u were using 10.3.9??
the disk utility partition / raid setup in tiger 10.4 was greatly improved over 10.3's version
for example u can set up raid stripes + do things in 10.4 setup that u cant do in 10.3.9
so i would suggest that u use a tiger install dvd to boot + simply dont install but click on utilities to access the newer version of disk utility.. this will allow u to try to see if its formatting + partition types work better then the panther disk utility and im pretty sure that they do..
for example i think tiger supports GPT partition types and panther might not..

u could get the full size of your 4tb drive by partitionining it with GUID partition type.. (GPT)
but u would not be able to have any bootable os on the drive...

[supernova777]

From what I've read here and elsewhere, SATA cards are limited by the speed of the PCI bus, and that the ATA/100 controller should be roughly similar in speed. And the PATA/SATA adapter was about $5, vs. maybe $80 for a SATA PCI card. Hence the decision to go with the adapter.

Unless I'm mistaken, only the ATA/100 controller supports 48-bit LBA, which means the ATA/66 controller (besides being slower) can only address up to 137 GB. And actually, from what I've seen, it won't even recognize larger drives. I'd have to check myself, but I seem to recall that being the case. So that would mean it's only possible to have 2 "large" drives internally if one only uses the internal controllers.

pci card will give higher speed then the ata100 controller
by a small percentage

see this post by mactron
http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=2023.msg10538#msg10538
which shows this graphic made by him to illustrate differences in bandwidth


so as u can see.. the ata100 controller will work just fine yes..
what this graphic does not show is the speed of ata66 controller which woiuld be even smaller then the ata100 (of course)
and this port is the port on the left size of the mdd.

[lukpac]

hey there lukpac
yep i would take the 4tb back if u could and exchange it for a 2tb drive which is the max u can use with powerpc computers

as noted even if it appears to work.. it was said that once u get to a filled capacity u will experience data corruption or data loss and u will lose data + the drive will screw up etc

I don't plan on returning it. Right now 2 TB drives cost more anyway. And I see no reason why any data would get corrupt, since "a filled capacity" is ~2 TB, not 4 TB. It's never going to write more than that limit since there are no partitions there.

this is a physical limit much like the whole 4gb ram barrier of 32bit windows xp ..it just wasnt built to address more then that.. etc if u are using an MDD dual 1.25ghz + a pata adapter u should be ok having it connecte to the aTA100 port.. that is the port next to the cpu on the far right side of the motherboard when viewing it from the side door opening towards u.. which would mean u would probably need the drive installed in that drive carrier near the port on the right side aswell..

I believe the physical limit is in the controller, and using the ATA/100 controller (or a SATA card), that isn't an issue. What *is* an issue is the APM partitioning scheme that OS 9 requires.

heres the deal..
if the drive is just a storage drive...(not a system boot drive)
then u can use it with mac os x using a GPT partition..
im not sure if mac os 9 will recognize GPT partitions as i have not tested this myself.
but i would guess that it doesnt?? if i had to guess.. but i could be wrong.
if the drive is formatted GPT partition type then it can be larger then 2.2TB and u can
get the full capacity of the drive...

for me personally.. to fix a problem like this. i would just move the drive to a server that runs mac os X (intel)
or Unix.. or 64bit Intel + share the drive using AFP somehow and access the drive over the network.. and voila problem solved.

if the drive is used for the system to boot. then u are indeed
limited to 2.2TB in size by the technology of APM.. which is 100% neeeded to boot any powerpc computer.. be it mac os X or mac os 9.

I need to run OS 9, so regardless of booting (I currently have a boot partition setup, although in theory I could still boot off of another drive if I wanted to), as far as I know I need to partition using APM, which limits the drive to ~2 TB across all partitions.

ProTools needs direct access to the disk, so just using a file share isn't an option. I do have a server that I access, but one can't run sessions from that.

I may look into 10.4, but 1) I don't use OS X that often, and 2) I would still not be able to use GPT because the partitions need to be usable in OS 9, regardless of bootability.

It looks like a SATA card would be slightly faster, but not night and day. I've had no problems with the ATA/100 controller to this point, so I think I'm good just using the PATA/SATA adapter.

Also, I was apparently wrong about the ATA/66 controller not supporting LBA. I just put my 500 GB drive on there to see what would happen, and it worked fine (currently partitioned into 3 155 GB partitions). Good to know, even if that controller is slower. I must have been confused over the fact that that ATA/100 controller won't work without Mac OS ROM 9.6.1.

[DieHard]

From what I've read here and elsewhere, SATA cards are limited by the speed of the PCI bus, and that the ATA/100 controller should be roughly similar in speed. And the PATA/SATA adapter was about $5, vs. maybe $80 for a SATA PCI card. Hence the decision to go with the adapter.

Well, actually the PATA/IDE is much slower, depending on the SATA card (like a Seritek 1eVE2+2 64 bit card), the speed would actually be "night and day"; even the non-64 bit card would offer a very noticable improvement, you can also read about the real world speeds in these threads.

http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=2023.0
http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=803.0
http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=306.0

Unless I'm mistaken, only the ATA/100 controller supports 48-bit LBA, which means the ATA/66 controller (besides being slower) can only address up to 137 GB. And actually, from what I've seen, it won't even recognize larger drives. I'd have to check myself, but I seem to recall that being the case. So that would mean it's only possible to have 2 "large" drives internally if one only uses the internal controllers.

Looks like you already figured this one out and that both controllers on the MDD work with 500GB drives.  My (3) MDD 1.33 Ghz. units all have the same configuration, I chose NOT to use a SATA card since I have a PowerCore PCI, 2496, and a UAD-1 in each unit, so I do not want to use and PCI bandwidth and chose to use the internal controllers.  I did opt for a 256 GB SSD as my Primary boot, Samples drive, and current projects (from OWC); then I have (3) 500GB... so I get almost 2 TB on each unit;  the speed of an SSD for Booting, loading samples, and recording (current projects only) is incredible.  I recommend an SSD at least for the OS.

As an added note, I just got in a used MDD, a 750GB PATA/IDE...
Seagate DB35 Series 7200.3 ST3750840ACE 750GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 / ATA-6
I confirmed this drive has no issues under OS 9, So the Native MAX (without SATA converters) is 4 X 750GB = 3 TB

Lastly, I have used this adapter/bracket (which is exactly the size of an original PATA/IDE drive)
ACARD ARS-2133 IDE/PATA-to-SATA HDD/SSD Bridge Adapter
http://www.ebay.com/itm/261237296692?_trksid=p2059210.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT
and mounted fast SATA notebook hard drives in MDDs