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FYI, in addition to publishing Low End Mac and doing some Mac consulting, I'm working a third shift job 2 to 4 nights a week, so replying to emails and phone calls may take some time.


Thursday, January 21, 2010

How Big a Hard Drive Does My Mac Support?

A Low End Mac reader with a Umax SuperMac S900 asked me, "What is the max size HD I can put in my machine?"

Back in those days, Apple still used SCSI drives on its Power Macs - as did the clone makers.

SCSI devices are somewhat intelligent, unlike IDE/ATA/SATA drives which are under control of the operating system and hardware interface. To the best of my knowledge, there is no maximum size for SCSI drives. Mac OS 7.5.1 and earlier cannot handle partition sizes over 2 GB, and from 7.5.2 through 8.0, the maximum is 4 GB. On top of that, you can have up to 8 (or was it 9) partitions per drive. With the introduction of HFS+ in Mac OS 8.1, that jumped to 2 TB.



If you're using more modern hardware with IDE/Ultra ATA hard drives, be sure to read How Big a Hard Drive Can I Put in My iMac, eMac, or Power Mac?, which explains the 128 GB limitation of the IDE bus in G3 and some G4 Macs.

 

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1 comment:

  1. Yuhong BaoJuly 28, 2010 at 9:56 PM

    "To the best of my knowledge, there is no maximum size for SCSI drives. Mac OS 7.5.1 and earlier cannot handle partition sizes over 2 GB, and from 7.5.2 through 8.0, the maximum is 4 GB. On top of that, you can have up to 8 (or was it 9) partitions per drive. With the introduction of HFS+ in Mac OS 8.1, that jumped to 2 TB."
    Not correct sorry. Until System 7.5, this limit was 2GB. System 7.5 boosted it to 4GB. The PCI Power Mac and PowerPC PowerBooks released in 1995 boosted it to 2TB, which was backported to all 68040 and later Macs with Mac OS 7.6.

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