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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