Before anyone gets too excited, the larger the hard drive the larger each slice that the particular formatting scheme you use will be. I remember when I stuck a 20 or 40 gigger into my old StarMax 3000 with 8.1 or 8.6 (it's been a while) and even a twenty byte text file would soak up 144k on the disc or some such. Now a 143k text file would also take up 144k (and a 145k file 288k), but the lack of being able to hit the size spot on is a problem of sorts.
Partitioning can get you around this issue.
So that's just to say that though you'll be able to throw in any hd you wish, there are some slight limitations that the OS (more properly, the HFS+ format, I suppose) will impose.
Hair splitting for the day over! ;^)
Well, as long as we're splitting hairs, let's pick some nits.
The problem you describe is unique to HFS (Mac OS Standard), NOT HFS+. In HFS+ (Mac OS Extended), this problem doesn't exist. It stems from how the format divides the total storage volume into blocks. HFS has a fixed number of blocks per volume, so the larger the volume, the larger the blocks. That's why partitioning is an HFS drive is a good idea if your drive is larger than 2GB or so. HFS+ is not fixed in the same manner. It can have a fairly dynamic number of blocks and allows the user to choose between .5kB blocks, 1kB blocks, 2kB blocks, and 4kB blocks (and possibly 8kB blocks, but I don't really remember). Drive Setup only allows the 4kB choice, but 3rd party formatting tools let you pick the other sizes.
So the problem is with HFS, not the HFS+ format as you supposed. Apple realized this problem as drives were becoming big(ger) and fixed it by introducing HFS+ under OS 8.1. HFS+ can also recognize & format ridiculously large volumes (2.5TB, IIRC). The size is actually limited by the controller and how many bites it can address. The 3400 can't do ATA-6, so it can't do 48-bit addressing, so it doesn't support volumes larger than 128GB or so (I forget the upper limit). There may be other limitations in the ROM...
I have a 200GB hard drive formatted in HFS+, and my blocks are only 4kB.
And that takes care of my nit-picking for the day. ;^)
Peace, Drew --
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