IIRC, HFS supports 2Tb drives, but the following URL has relevant
information: http://chrislawson.net/writing/macdaniel/010219cl.shtml
(Copypasted for your laziness ;) )
How Large a Drive Does My Mac Support?
Originally published 19 February 2001 as a Mac Daniel column for Low End
Mac.
*Q: I have a Mac SE running System 6. What's the biggest hard disk I can
use? I've heard some things about a limit of the hard disk size on an SE.*
*A: Just to dispel a bunch of nasty little rumours that seem to be
floating around*, there has never been an inherent hardware limit on
hard disk size on any Macintosh. The limitation on hard disk size has
always rested squarely in the operating system and the hard disk
formatting.
Any Mac running System 6 has a two gigabyte limit on maximum volume
(partition) size, but any hard disk can be used as long as the largest
partition is under 2 GB. For example, you could use a 9.1 GB SCSI HD
with any Mac no matter what the OS as long as the largest partition on
it was under 2 GB. Also note that Apple's drive partitioning tools only
support up to eight partitions per drive, so 16 GB is a realistic limit
through System 7.1.x.
This limit was increased to 4 GB with System 7.5 and then to 2 terabytes
(TB) with System 7.5.2 on some Macs (See Apple KBase Article 8647 for
details <http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=8647>), but your
SE is not among them. Any Mac running OS 8.1 with HFS+ formated drives
will also support 2-TB partitions, so if your Mac is running 8.1 or
later, you can use any SCSI-based hard disk on the market today (with
the appropriate adapters, if necessary) without partitioning.
Of course, this brings up two caveats: using partitions greater than
2 GB under HFS is incredibly inefficient due to the large block sizes
required ***, and running System 7.5 on a Plus, SE, or Classic is /not/
a good way to "more efficiently" use a large hard disk. System 7.5 is
far too slow to be used on the 68000-based Macs in daily use, and
coupled with the efficiency factor I just mentioned, well, it's just not
worth it.
*HFS Plus, which is a far more efficient method of formatting due to its
smaller block sizes, is only available on Mac OS 8.1 and later, and
680x0-based Macs can't use an HFS Plus-formatted drive as a boot drive.
-Dan Wood
Stuart Bell wrote:
On 20 Nov 2005, at 09:14, Eddie Smith wrote:
Hi ... I've just been given a Mac which contains a 40mb drive.
What would the largest capacity drive be that I could put into this
machine.
It's running system OS 7.0.1 at the moment
ISTR the limit for that OS is 2Gb. OTOH, you'd be pushed to find 2Gb
of s/w that will run on a Classic II, not because of the lack of s/w,
but because s/w of that era is so compact!
Stuart
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