Maximum Number of Hard Disk Drives / CD-ROM drives in ProDOS 8 and GSOS?

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Here2Learn's picture
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Maximum Number of Hard Disk Drives / CD-ROM drives in ProDOS 8 and GSOS?

Hi. What is the maximum number of ProDOS 8 hard drives (single partition) in the last version of ProDOS 8 in an enhanced //e?

What is the maximum number of ProDOS 8 hard rives (single partition) using GSOS 6.0.1 in an Apple IIGS?

What is the maximum number of GSOS hard drives (single partition or multiple) using GSOS 6.0.1 in an Apple IIGS?

Also, the same on CD-ROM drives.

Thank you very much.

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Re: Maximum Number of Hard Disk Drives / CD-ROM drives in ...

Here,

When you say CD-ROM Drives, do you mean "Read-Write" CD-ROM Drives?
Or do you mean "Rewritable" CD Drives?
Or do you mean "Plain old CD-ROM drives?

Ok... I'm just pullin' your leg
As far as I know, you were never able to use a CD-ROM Drive on an Apple II.
I may be wrong, but I don't think so.

Anyone else?
Speedy? Transwarp, Doc?

Steven Smile

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Re: Maximum Number of Hard Disk Drives / CD-ROM drives in ...

Hi. What is the maximum number of ProDOS 8 hard drives (single partition) in the last version of ProDOS 8 in an enhanced //e?

David Empson on comp.sys.apple2 can tell you for sure. In general, you can probably have two per "slot" - and the latest version of ProDOS 8 does a good job of mapping drives to phantom slots. You can see this with a CFFA3000 by mapping a pile of virtual disks to the SmartPort. So 14 is a likely max.

What is the maximum number of ProDOS 8 hard rives (single partition) using GSOS 6.0.1 in an Apple IIGS?

I'm not sure if GSOS can have more or not.

What is the maximum number of GSOS hard drives (single partition or multiple) using GSOS 6.0.1 in an Apple IIGS?

Maybe you mean Mac HFS partitions? There's not a meaningful difference between GSOS and ProDOS partitioning.

Also, the same on CD-ROM drives.

Hmmm. SCSI. You might be able to daisy-chain 7 SCSI CD-ROMs per card; with slots 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7 occupied, that might give you 6*7=42 devices; but I'm not sure if anything other than GSOS could address them all.

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Re: Maximum Number of Hard Disk Drives / CD-ROM drives in ...

Perhaps I should have narrowed it down to...if one has just one SCSI card.

"1988 March

AppleCD SC (CD-ROM drive, $1199) introduced for both the Macintosh and Apple II. Also introduced were the Apple II SCSI Card Rev C (supporting partitioning on large capacity disk drives)"

apple2history.org

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Re: Maximum Number of Hard Disk Drives / CD-ROM drives in ...

Any Apple II with slots can technically use a CD drive. The down side is that Pre IIgs machines can pretty much only read ProDOS CDs. And there were only a couple of CDs ever available with ProDOS partitions. Unless you’ve burned your own CDs you’re very limited.
Also as you go back the usability of a CD drive declines. While a CD drive does work on an Integer basic Apple II, most people don’t run a lot of ProDOS software on them.

Here,

When you say CD-ROM Drives, do you mean "Read-Write" CD-ROM Drives?
Or do you mean "Rewritable" CD Drives?
Or do you mean "Plain old CD-ROM drives?

Ok... I'm just pullin' your leg
As far as I know, you were never able to use a CD-ROM Drive on an Apple II.
I may be wrong, but I don't think so.

Anyone else?
Speedy? Transwarp, Doc?

Steven :)

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Re: Maximum Number of Hard Disk Drives / CD-ROM drives in ...

ProDOS 8 on an 8-bit Apple II would only be able to see ProDOS volumes on a CD-ROM, meaning it couldn't be bigger than 32MB. I don't know what would happen if you pulled formatting shenanigans and somehow got multiple 32MB ProDOS volumes on a single disc - how would they map out indeed?

As for recognizing partitions under ProDOS 8 (which is what I run by default on my GS), I can tell you that *I* normally have 11 partitions recognized at all times, PLUS there's a very large HFS-formatted partition that ProDOS 8 ignores. AppleWorks, annoyingly, only displays the first 6 or 8 on its menus, leaving me to use the annoying Prefix command to get to some of those disks.

(What the heck am I running, you ask? Well the CFFA in Slot 7 has 4 partitions - two get mapped to Slot 4 - the SuperDrive Controller in Slot 1 has two FDHD, then there's 2 5.25" drives mapped to Slot 6, a single 800K Apple 3.5 Drive in S5D1, and then a RamDisk in S5D2. That's 10. Then there's /RAM in Slot 3 if the application isn't using all 128K of 8-bit RAM, making 11 sometimes.)

Hope this helps,
Warr

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Re: Maximum Number of Hard Disk Drives / CD-ROM drives in ...

Wayne,

See?, I learn something new every time I'm here. Smile

All this time I didn't think that it was possible to use a CD-ROM Drive with my Apple II's.

Mac's...yes. II's...no.

Maybe it's time to do some experimentation.

Steven Smile

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Re: Maximum Number of Hard Disk Drives / CD-ROM drives in ...

wernst, way to go! Smile

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