Timeline for Why did PC users need partitions in the 1980s
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
15 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 21 at 12:30 | audit | First answers | |||
| Mar 21 at 16:50 | |||||
| Feb 27 at 23:35 | comment | added | davolfman | We had a 40MB in to 20MB partitions C and D. Ultima 7 could literally not be installed if I remember. It was very nice when we swapped out the board for something with IDE and a later version of DOS. | |
| Feb 27 at 6:23 | comment | added | AlexD | @user10489 LBA was recommended for disks >528MB by ATA-2 specs from 1996. CHS was used for legacy BIOS/bootloaders/OS which didn't support LBA. There also were all these weird LBA-to-CHS translations done by newer BIOSes for legacy OS and bootloaders. CHS is still mentioned in ATA-8 specs but marked obsolete since 2001. I suspect most modern BIOSes still support INT 13h API with CHS but you can't address beyond 8GB using it. | |
| Feb 26 at 12:16 | comment | added | user10489 | CHS addressing was used long after it no longer reflected the actual geometry of the disk (i.e., variable sectors). I think only when linear addressing was needed to actually address all the blocks was it dropped. | |
| Feb 26 at 6:22 | comment | added | AlexD | But grouping the data together was still important to reduce seek time. Defragmentation solved this problem too and the tools appeared in the late 80s. | |
| Feb 26 at 6:19 | comment | added | AlexD | @user28434, the correction is right, originally disks used CHS addressing with a constant number of sectors per cylinder and constant sector size. With constant revolution speed, you get a constant transfer speed. The outer cylinders had larger gaps between sectors and wasted a lot of space. This changed by the mid-90s with the introduction of Zone Bit Recording. | |
| Feb 26 at 6:14 | comment | added | fraxinus | @user28434 the variable number of sectors per cylinder and the related variable read/write timing in hard disks became a thing in e.g. late 1990s, until then the timing and the data rate were constant over the whole disk | |
| Feb 26 at 0:19 | vote | accept | Evert | ||
| Feb 26 at 0:20 | |||||
| Feb 25 at 21:46 | comment | added | user28434 | @fraxinus, pretty sure that effect is geometry based and was there since the start of the Universe | |
| Feb 25 at 21:06 | comment | added | fraxinus | I think outer cylinders becama faster somewhat later | |
| Feb 25 at 12:29 | comment | added | user10489 | I forgot about partitioning for speed! But that wasn't true until variable sectors per track became a thing. | |
| Feb 25 at 8:54 | history | edited | AlexD | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 3 characters in body
|
| Feb 25 at 8:39 | history | edited | AlexD | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 2 characters in body
|
| Feb 25 at 8:30 | history | edited | AlexD | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 242 characters in body
|
| Feb 25 at 8:17 | history | answered | AlexD | CC BY-SA 4.0 |