On that machine, 7.x should happily be able to use the big disk. What I'd do is boot from a ~4 gig partition, and then create a few partitions at about 10-20 gigs each.
This thread: https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/18290-mac-os-9-ssds/is interesting. Look at this post: https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/18290-mac-os-9-ssds/page-2&do=findComment&comment=273628 in particular. (Please disregard most of what Elfen said in the thread, it is simply wrong.)
Basically, 7.6 on a PowerPC system will happily run a 2TB partition.
If you really really really need 74 gigs of small files, what I'd do is this:
Boot and run 7.6.1 on that machine, in a 4-gig partition with your OS and apps. It'll be so much faster than 8.6 on there. Install Disk Copy 6.x as well. Then, create a single partition with all of the rest of the disk. On that partition, put disk images for all of your data. Mount and dismount as you need.
Doing it this way, you avoid any real problems where "omg why is this text file three megs on disk?" (because an IMG file will more efficiently use the 65,000 allocation blocks on plain HFS) and you can get pretty neat compartmentalization of data as well. Plus, you can copy those IMG files off the machine to a network location pretty easily to make backups. Perhaps, keep one that's simply a copy of your boot system device as a form of imaging the whole computer from time to time.
This thread: https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/18290-mac-os-9-ssds/is interesting. Look at this post: https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/18290-mac-os-9-ssds/page-2&do=findComment&comment=273628 in particular. (Please disregard most of what Elfen said in the thread, it is simply wrong.)
Basically, 7.6 on a PowerPC system will happily run a 2TB partition.
If you really really really need 74 gigs of small files, what I'd do is this:
Boot and run 7.6.1 on that machine, in a 4-gig partition with your OS and apps. It'll be so much faster than 8.6 on there. Install Disk Copy 6.x as well. Then, create a single partition with all of the rest of the disk. On that partition, put disk images for all of your data. Mount and dismount as you need.
Doing it this way, you avoid any real problems where "omg why is this text file three megs on disk?" (because an IMG file will more efficiently use the 65,000 allocation blocks on plain HFS) and you can get pretty neat compartmentalization of data as well. Plus, you can copy those IMG files off the machine to a network location pretty easily to make backups. Perhaps, keep one that's simply a copy of your boot system device as a form of imaging the whole computer from time to time.