alexis@dasys1.UUCP (Alexis Rosen) (07/02/88)
Recently, Marc Kaufman (kaufman@polya.stanford.edu) wrote: >In article <5151@dasys1.UUCP> alexis@dasys1.UUCP (Alexis Rosen) writes: >>The concept of the path is an elegant solution to the generic problem of how >>to store and categorize files. In the Mac's case, it needs only one or two >>alterations to really provide an intuitive, useful, and *COMPATIBLE* solution >>to the problem that you, I, and everyone's uncle Harry is having with >>organizing files on your typical average 780 MB disk... > >I should point out that the minimum allocation unit on your uncle's disk is >12288 bytes. I submit that this won't be a real problem until Apple's file >system can handle more than 65K allocation units per volume. It's my disk... And I don't see what the allocation blocksize has to do with anything. After all, MS-DOS and OS/2 (!) can't even deal with disks larger than 32MB, and surely they make good use of paths (and "appends"). (Well, they may not make "good" use, but they sure need them!) Actually, the 64k allocation block limit was one of the first bad things I noticed about HFS, but honestly, it really isn't so bad. Now that we're starting to see formatters which can create genuine SCSI partitions, most people will want their 3 GB disks in several reasonable 500 MB partitions, which would have block sizes of 8 KB. Of course, if you are tracking the complete history of every person in your country, maybe you do want one large partition, but then the 8K block size isn't going to be such a hassle, anyway. Stated more precisely, if your files are small, use small partitions. If your files are large, use large partitions. Either way, your wasted space will be insignificant. All this assumes that the allocation blocksize is determined on a SCSI partition-by-partition basis. If I'm wrong about this (I don't think I am), then the blocksize is more of a hassle for large disks, but I STILL don't see what this has to do with the path concept. -- Alexis Rosen {allegra,philabs,cmcl2}!phri\ Writing from {bellcore,harpo,cmcl2}!cucard!dasys1!alexis The Big Electric Cat {portal,well,sun}!hoptoad/ Public UNIX if mail fails: ...cmcl2!cucard!cunixc!abr1