How large of a hard drive does HDB-DOS support?
A. Let’s look at HDB-DOS’s requirements at maximum usage. First, HDB-DOS supports a maximum of 256 virtual floppy disks (0-255). Each virtual floppy looks like a standard 35 track, single-sided, double-density floppy disk, capable of holding 161,280 bytes. With a maximum of 256 drives, this would require 161,280 x 256, or 41,287,680 bytes (41 megabytes) of storage. Since HDB-DOS uses only the first 256 bytes of a sector, and virtually all hard drives today have 512 byte sectors, HDB-DOS will ignore, or waste, the second half of each sector on that drive. So on a 512 byte sector device, the actual space used is double, or 82,575,360 (82 megabytes). The maximum amount of hard drive space that HDB-DOS requires is 41,287,680 x (S / 256) where S is the number of bytes per sector of the hard drive. Today’s hard drives are much, much larger than 82 megabytes. Still, you can search for a smaller hard drive if you don’t feel comfortable wasting a lot of space. Also, NitrOS-9 users can split the
