HFS+

[Christopher Murtagh]

On Thu, 19 Jun 2003, Tim Seufert wrote:
>On Thursday, June 19, 2003, at 09:16  AM, Christopher Murtagh wrote:
>> Having worked with Macs for more than 10 years, I can honestly say
>>that I have seen more corrupted HFS[+] file systems than anything else.
>
>Under 9 or X?  My experience under X has been that HFS+ never gets 
>corrupted unless there's a hardware problem or a traumatic event (loss 
>of power, kernel panic, etc.).

 Under 9, and 8.x. Admittedly I hardly ever use OS X.

> The miracle is that it worked as well as it did; the occasional FS
>corruption was just sort of a natural byproduct of the festering mess
>underneath the hood.

 I suppose you are right on this one.

>IIRC the spec was 10-15% slower when writing, no change for reads.  In my
>experience this overhead is unnoticeable.  Very similar to ext3 vs ext2
>on Linux: ext3 is slower, but not by enough to care about, much less give
>up journalling over.

 My (limited) experience with OS X has been that any performance loss is a 
bad thing. My G4/400 at home really doesn't do OS X as well as it does 
Linux (which is what I use about 98% of the time). So the thought of a 15% 
performance hit is really not appealing.

>>  It also is a 'case
>> insensitive, case preserving' (read 'worst of both worlds')  file 
>> system,
>
>Why would this be the worst of both worlds?  The very users for whom case
>insensitivity is intended would also hate (with a passion) any FS that
>doesn't preserve case.

 Not really thinking of a users perspective, but from a geek perspective. 
The idea that you need a bitmask when reading, but not when writing file 
names just seems wrong and gives me the willies. :-) Also, I've noticed 
that some Apps are still case sensitive (like Bash on OS X), which is even 
more confusing. It would make it a real pain to write a DB type app that 
does a lot of file swapping to automatically named files depending on 
context.. they would work under ext2/3 but break on HFS+. 

 My biggest gripe about case insensitivity is that it reminds me of 
neophytes who send everything with the caps lock on, and their sentences 
are so bad, you can tell that they've been 'hunt and peck' typing with two 
fingers.

Cheers,

Chris

-- 

Christopher Murtagh
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McGill University
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