lane@SUMEX-AIM.STANFORD.EDU (Christopher Lane) (10/20/90)
As far as our machines at work go, I'm not too concerned about the size of the 105MB drives as we plan to mount most of the file system off of a large (> 1GB) NS server. However, 105MB in a home machine is a real concern. Also, the real utility of the optical drive for me is that I'm able to 'clone' NeXTs around here fairly trivially, without it on the NeXTstation, I was concerned about how I was going to install multiple machines without a hassle. So, as an experiment, I wrote a disktab entry and BLD.* script, formatted up an Apple HD80SC (Quantum ProDrive 80) external drive and tried to bring up my NeXT using it instead of the internal 330MB drive. I'm currently running in that configuration, under the Workspace (composing this message). I've got 66MB used on the disk of which 16MB is swap. Of course, to do it, I had to toss /NextLibrary (except for /Fonts), TeX, Mathematica, LocalLibrary, Sybase, CommonLisp, lots of music utilities, etc. For what I spend most of my time doing (reading, writing & editing email messages) my environment looks the same as it always does ;-). With a 105MB drive you can't have everything but you can make a workable environment if you're willing to give up some of the 'extras' and focus on what you need. I also think the HD80SC will be great for installing NeXTs. - Christopher PS: Please, no questions about formatting and installing Apple HD80SC drives, I just did enough to get things running and wouldn't suggest this to others. -------