[Discussion] Hard Drive Partition Sizes

[Dave Yeo]

On 03/01/10 11:01 pm, Thomas Clayton wrote:
> Dave:
>
> --- On Tue, 3/2/10, Dave Yeo<daveryeo at telus.net>  wrote:
> ...<  snip>  ...
>>
>> Current OS/2 versions are limited to 64 GBs. Presumably the
>> Linux
>> version could be adapted to larger.
>> Also HPFS has that 2 GB file size limit.
>>
>> Dave
>
> If you re-check my first letter, at the beginning of the quote from
> Jan van Wijk, he says
> "FS-size upto 2 terabyte (2048 GiB) by design"
> .
> While YOU may be correct, I think HE is saying 2 TB for a single file!
> (Yes. I know. Seemingly UNbelievable.
>   It IS hard for ME to believe, too!)
>

This got me thinking and vaguely remembering a workaround (actually 
undocumented call) for large file support, probably HPFS specific.
This page contains a copy of Design goals and implementation of the new 
High Performance File System from Microsoft Systems Journal, 
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~bolo/shipyard/hpfs.html which is interesting. 
It also states that there is no limit to file size on HPFS besides the 
partition limit though with the current implementation it would not be 
very efficient.
This page explains that it is an OS/2 limitation that limits the 
filesize to 2 GB though as Bob mentioned OS/2 4.5+ includes 64 bit 
versions of the API to deal with very large files. 
http://www.lesbell.com.au/hpfsfaq.html#FILESIZE
It also mentions the hidden API which allows using sectors instead of 
bytes for addressing. This would mean the program is responsible for 
managing much more of the file structure then usual but should in theory 
allow for 1 TB files if my math is right
Dave