bedney@monolith.lanl.gov (William J. Edney) (06/10/91)
To All - I went to reformat my hard drive this weekend and this is what happened: I have an Imprimis Wren VII 1 GB hard drive (which is not supported by NeXT) at home. I wanted to split the drive into two partitions because I've had to rebuild hard drives for people who only have stations and I want to do this by setting up a "mini-network" (i.e. boot their machines off of mine). Under 2.0, a person with a hard drive not supported by NeXT and wanting to split that hard drive into two partitions had to write their own disktab, which I did grudgingly. I knew at the time that I did not optimize my hard disk for all of its storage, but I was in a hurry and didn't want to have to play around with adding and subtracting bytes from one partition to another. Then, I got 2.1. I "updated" the 2.0 optical to 2.1 and went to do another BuildDisk on my hard drive. This time when I said I wanted two partitions BuildDisk came up with a little dialog box with a slider in it. As I moved the slider, it subtracted bytes from one partition and added them to the other. What a great idea. If your SCSI drive supports the MODE_SENSE command, you don't need those disktabs any more (unless you want 3 or more partitions)!! Thanks NeXT for making my life easier once again (or as a colleague of mine remarked "Wow, they're really trying to make Unix livable!!" -- - Bill Edney - Los Alamos National Laboratory "I don't speak for my employer and they don't speak for me. Kind of a nice arrangement."
eps@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott) (06/11/91)
In article <25377@lanl.gov> bedney@monolith.lanl.gov (William J. Edney) writes: > As I moved the slider, it subtracted >bytes from one partition and added them to the other. What a great idea. If >your SCSI drive supports the MODE_SENSE command, you don't need those disktabs >any more (unless you want 3 or more partitions)!! Not entirely true. Unless you are absolutely 100% satisfied with the default setup (I sure wasn't!), you'll still want disktab entries. NeXT needs to do quite a bit more work in this area... -=EPS=-
bedney@monolith.lanl.gov (William J. Edney) (06/11/91)
In article <1696@toaster.SFSU.EDU> eps@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott) writes: > In article <25377@lanl.gov> bedney@monolith.lanl.gov (William J. Edney) writes: > > As I moved the slider, it subtracted > >bytes from one partition and added them to the other. What a great idea. If > >your SCSI drive supports the MODE_SENSE command, you don't need those disktabs > >any more (unless you want 3 or more partitions)!! > > Not entirely true. Unless you are absolutely 100% satisfied with > the default setup (I sure wasn't!), you'll still want disktab > entries. NeXT needs to do quite a bit more work in this area... > > -=EPS=- Eric - What other optimization is needed? I mean, if my hard disk says it has 989MB to give me, and 2.1 BuildDisk goes out there and formats 989MB, what's the difference between that and writing my own disktab?? Educate me, please. -- - Bill Edney - Los Alamos National Laboratory "I don't speak for my employer and they don't speak for me. Kind of a nice arrangement."
eps@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott) (06/12/91)
In article <25455@lanl.gov> bedney@monolith.lanl.gov (William J. Edney) writes: >What other optimization is needed? I mean, if my hard disk says it has 989MB to >give me, and 2.1 BuildDisk goes out there and formats 989MB, what's the >difference between that and writing my own disktab?? >Educate me, please. The most common things one might want to tweak are cylinders-per- group and bytes-per-inode. You have to ask yourself what you're going to be using that second partition for--if it's something like a news spool, you're going to want to warp things quite a bit to accomodate a large number of mostly small files with high turnover. I also had a fairly bad experience with 2.0's default handling for "genuine NeXT" MAXTOR XT-8760S-1024 drives--I got things working by booting a 1.0a optical and using that to initialize the drive, then doing a command-line builddisk under 2.0 with the -n option so it wouldn't reinitialize. Of course, this was before the '040 upgrade... -=EPS=-
bedney@monolith.lanl.gov (William J. Edney) (06/13/91)
In article <1705@toaster.SFSU.EDU> eps@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott) writes: > The most common things one might want to tweak are cylinders-per- > group and bytes-per-inode. You have to ask yourself what you're > going to be using that second partition for--if it's something > like a news spool, you're going to want to warp things quite a > bit to accomodate a large number of mostly small files with high > turnover. Hmmm. Well, I'm mainly using the clients partition (which I made very small) to help people with NeXTstations boot over a "mini-net" that I set up and install their software after they've trashed their hard disk (this has happened twice!). Do I need to tweak or are the NeXT defaults OK?? -- - Bill Edney - Los Alamos National Laboratory "I don't speak for my employer and they don't speak for me. Kind of a nice arrangement."
eps@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott) (06/13/91)
In article <25541@lanl.gov> bedney@monolith.lanl.gov (William J. Edney) writes: >Hmmm. Well, I'm mainly using the clients partition (which I made very small) to >help people with NeXTstations boot over a "mini-net" that I set up and install >their software after they've trashed their hard disk (this has happened >twice!). Do I need to tweak or are the NeXT defaults OK?? You don't "need" to tweak. What you have is usable. -=EPS=-