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© 1997-2006
Gareth Knight
All Rights reserved

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I have seen 4Gb+ hard drives available but have heard that the Amiga cannot handle these as standard. Is this true?

It's true to an extent. When the Amiga was released in 1985 there was little demand for 4Gb drives (they didn't even exist at that point), so the Amiga developers were unconcerned at imposing a 32-bit limit. It must be noted that at the time MS-DOS could hardly handle hard drives at all and would take 10 years to support drives over 500Mb properly. Since then the cost of such drives has decreased, making them a more common purchase by the Amiga owner. However, using the a standard Amiga these drives cannot be used to their full, and ways of getting around this limit must be found that either patch or replace the standard Amiga file system.

Using the standard Amiga FFS (FastFile System) you can use the first 4GB of the drive without any patches, but if you try to use the last 2.4GB without a filesystem and device that supports it you will destroy the RDB and lose everything. To get around this you can patch FFS so that your device supports 4Gb+ drives. At present this is possible by either investing in a copy of IDEfix or AmigaOS 3.5 (when it becomes available). If you wish to try a free option it is possible to obtain a new version of FFS from the official Amiga website. There are still some problems, in that most disk tools will mess up if you use them on a partition that goes above 4GB. This includes the regular Format command. You should NEVER do a full format only a quick format of partitions that are stored above the 4GB limit.

Alternatively you can invest in a different filesystem that supports larger hard drives, such as SFS (available on Aminet) or PFS2. Of the two, PFS2 is the most stable, and shows increased performance in access time compared to FFS.

 

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