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From: tgoose@eng.umd.edu (Jason Garms)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Minor Hard Disk Question...
Message-ID: <1991May30.191716.1547@eng.umd.edu>
Date: 30 May 91 19:17:16 GMT
References: <1991May27.081538.9810@marlin.jcu.edu.au> <2896@lee.SEAS.UCLA.EDU>
Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (C-News)
Reply-To: tgoose@eng.umd.edu (Jason Garms)
Organization: College of Engineering, Maryversity of Uniland, College Park
Lines: 32

> The first part is something that I have noticed a lot with Apple's Formatter.
> For whatever reason, you get more disk space when you use SilverLining or
> some other non-Apple driver.  I don't know why Apple won't use the entire disk.
> Seems lame to me, but then again Apple has never been known for making the
> BEST software, just SOME software.  That's why 3rd parties were invented :).
> --
> \ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | /
> -  Michael Weiss  weiss@watson.seas.ucla.edu  |  School of Engineering and  -
> -                 izzydp5@oac.ucla.edu        |    Applied Science, UCLA    -
> / | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | \ 

If anyone cares...
The historical reason (if I remember correctly) that Apple's formatting software
does not use the full potential of the drive goes back to the introduction of the
SE's and II's.  When Apple first put 20 MEG drives into these machines the
software would format them to a little over 20Megs.  As was noted on a
previous post, Apple likes to switch drive manufacturers a lot.  What happened
is customers would have their data backed up, their drive would crash and Apple
would replace it with a new mechanism (sometimes from a different manufactuer).
These new drives couldn't always fit as much information as the original so when
the customer tried to unbackup the data, it would no longer fit!  Additionally
some backup-up software (I believe Apple's Tape Backup software is most notorius)
required the volume you backed up to be the exact same size as the volume you
restored to.

To solve these problems, Apple made the software so that it formatted all the
drives a little conservatively.

Hope this is informative!!!

Jason Garms
tgoose@eng.umd.edu