I wondered how big a drive I could use on a Focus card. I already had a CF adapter attached so I tried my largest CF an 8gb. I let it format for a few hours and found it wanted to make 30 partitions with a lot of space left over. I deleted some, adjusted some sizes and partitioned it. On rebooting the system, I could see all of the 8gb so I went through my box of 2.5” ide drives and found my largest a 20gb drive. I left it to format overnight and in the morning I took a look. I found that only 9gb was visible. Still higher than I had expected. If the card came out in 1993 then likely the software was written the previous year. I think it was a few years before they even made 2.5” hard drives that big.
Focus drive size
March 19, 2024 - 2:43pm
#1
Focus drive size
March 22, 2024 - 9:00am
#2
I had a couple Focus cards at
I had a couple Focus cards at one time. They were not very big. Only 587Mb and 674Mb, I think were the sizes. Never got around to removing them and plugging an IDE flash card into them.
Technically the largest size should be 512 bytes x 65536 x 256 (24-bits) = 8,589,934,592 bytes (8 Gb card), which rounds up to 9 Gb in actual bytes.
This is because the firmware only allows for a 24-bit block designation.
On another note: the CFFA card by Rich Dreher allowed for 28-bits for block designation which allowed for a 128 Gb card to be plugged in. This took extra programming though, so I only have an 8 Gb CFFA card plugged into my CFFA card right now. Still gives me 253 partitions.