Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!stanford.edu!agate!ziploc!eps
From: eps@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: 2.1 BuildDisk
Message-ID: <1705@toaster.SFSU.EDU>
Date: 12 Jun 91 04:14:55 GMT
References: <1696@toaster.SFSU.EDU> <25455@lanl.gov>
Reply-To: eps@cs.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott)
Organization: San Francisco State University
Lines: 21

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=-