What is PlusOptimizer & PlusMaker CD-ROM?

With Mac OS 8.1, Apple introduced HFS+, a hard disk formatting option that lets large hard disks use smaller allocation blocks. An allocation block is the smallest piece of a drive that a file can occupy; under the older HFS Standard formatting, even the tiniest file on a 4GB hard disk occupied 65K. Multiply that 65K by thousands of files and imagine the wasted space. Many people partitioned their hard drives to avoid some of that waste. With HFS+, however, files took up as little as 0.5K, even on large drives.

Apple’s default HFS+ formatting does not take full advantage of HFS+’s 0.5K potential and creates 4K blocks, still wasting some space. It also requires a full backup, reformat, and restore to implement. Enter Alsoft’s PlusMaker and PlusMaximizer.

Install the PlusMaximizer extension and a new option appears in the Finder’s erase disk dialog — Mac OS Maximized. This option reformats the drive using 0.5K blocks. Formatting our hard drive with this option was nearly instantaneous.

PlusMaker also creates 0.5K blocks, but it adds the advantage of converting a hard drive to HFS+ without requiring you to erase the disk and restore the data. PlusMaker took about a half hour to convert our 1.1GB drive, and it left the data completely intact. We freed up a whopping 215MB, about 32MB more space than if we’d used Apple’s 4K block size. Your mileage will vary.

It’s been rumored that the 0.5K block size can degrade the performance of a drive. Our benchmarks were inconclusive, with activity slowing as much as 5 percent sometimes and speeding up the same amount other times. We certainly could feel no difference.

PlusMaximizer will free up more space than Apple’s HFS+ formatting, but if you just dread erasing and reformatting drives, PlusMaker is the answer you’re looking for.

Holmes, Joseph O. (May 1998). PlusMaker 1.0.1 and PlusMaximizer 1.0. MacAddict. (pg. 49).

Download PlusOptimizer & PlusMaker CD-ROM for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 8.1

Compatibility notes

PlusOptimizer version 1.3 will optimize Mac OS X 10.0 through 10.3.9 Extended disks while running under Mac OS 9.x, for complete Mac OS 9 - 9.2.x compatibility and adds enhanced features when running under Mac OS 9 - 9.2.x.

PlusOptimizer will not optimize disks that have been written to by Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or later.
PlusOptimizer cannot optimize any disks shared with Mac OS X while running under Classic.
PlusOptimizer will not optimize UFS disks.

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver