OS 3.9 and big hard drives. Yes or no?

[MrBang]

Okay I know this is old news (again).  In fact I think I know the answer to this.  But it's easier to ask than to hire an archeology team to dig through my reference materials (again).

Can OS 3.9 properly handle hard drives bigger than 4 GIG?  If I remember right, that was one of the big deals (you know, like "it's about time....") about 3.9.

I wouldn't know because my HDs are all 4 GIG or less.  I was thinking about upgrading to bigger and better, but I wasn't actually sure if I should.

My thanks to the community for it's patience with my bipolar clean/dirty/expert/novice/brilliance/stupidity (again).

[Xand]

See my sig...

[adolescent]

3.5 on up support large HDs.  I have a 20GB in my OS3.9BB2 A1200 (which replaced the 8GB OS3.5 drive that I fried before it...).

[cgutjahr]

Yes, OS 3.9 can handle hard drives up to 128 TB (IIRC).

But when you turn the machine on, 3.9's enhancements to the Kickstart ROM are not enabled yet (they have to be loaded from disk). Therefore, your boot partition should be below the 4GB barrier. All other partitions can be as big as you want.

Just remember not to access any partitions beyond the 4GB barrier without OS 3.9 - if your boot partition gets corrupted, boot from the Emergency disk / CD instead.

[gaddar]

Allright then,
I'm adding a new dimension to this old question..
For those with big harddrives...
Which file system do you use?
FFS, AFS, PFS, SFS or something brandnew??

[Dragster]

Hi!!

I have 3 large HDs... I use SFS, freeware, fast.. still maintained, you can defrag and set some options to optimize access and it contains an optional .recycled dir to recolver deleted files (see docs for more info).

cheers

Dragster

[Xand]

I'm just using FFS. I've had no problems.

[HopperJF]

I used FFS and 3.9 worked fine on my old 10gb drive i had in my A1200

[delshay]

im useing PFS3 & it fast & blast-proof...

[gaddar]

Fair enough,
Now another dimension..(looks like I was waiting for this thread)
Assuming I've got 80gb harddrive, I wonder if it would work properly witout any additional (buffered)ide expansion such as powerflyer or idefix. Or else does the hardware do all the work?

Thank you...

[HotRod]

@gaddar

You can use the internal port with bigger harddrives.

Someone told me though that the internal IDE-port has a limitation that won't allow it to use harddrives bigger than 120Gb. The bigger drives are typically ATA133. The bigger drives does work with Power Flyer though.

I haven't checked this myself so I don't know if it's true or not.