John Siracusa, the Mac OS X guru who writes those insanely detailed and well-written Mac OS X reviews for Ars Technica, once told a story about the evolution of the HFS+ file system in Mac OS X - he said it was a struggle between the Mac guys who wanted the features found in BeOS' BFS, and the NEXT guys who didn't really like these features. In the end, the Mac guys won, and over the course of six years, Mac OS X reached feature parity - and a little more - with the BeOS (at the FS level).
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Member since:2008-07-15
Maybe I'm just the odd one out, but I've had issues with data loss on ext4 in the event of a system crash or hibernation gone bad and none, I repeat none, with HFS+. That being said, I agree fully that HFS+ is antiquated in design and should get replaced with a better filesystem. But please, please not ext4!
Member since:2006-09-30
Member since:2005-07-24
Mount with the "nodelalloc" option. Ted T'so is still singing "La! La! La!" with his fingers stuck in his ears, admiring his great benchmark and fragmentation avoidance numbers, and thinking that the patches he put into 2.6.30 really and truly mitigated the important problems inherent in delayed allocation in a meaningful way.
I believed him, sorta. Until it trashed several of one of my customers' C/ISAM files after a crash. And then did it again a week later. (The crash was unrelated to the FS and will soon be fixed.)
Currently, I have "nodelalloc" set in fstab, and "data=journal" set as default in the superblock. I don't think I really need data=journal, but the customer says they see no noticeable performance penalty, so I'm leaving it.
However, I think that "nodelalloc" is probably the only change I really needed to make. We ran ext3 for years at the defaults, and *never* had these issues, even under adverse conditions.
Edited 2009-10-25 02:23 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
I will never use ext4. Use ext3 as a general purpose filesystem or XFS if you really need specific performance but don't use ext4 - it just isn't necessary. I won't use a distro that won't let you change the default filesystem.
While I respect Ted Tso's work over the years I'm afraid he's another developer who has got to the point where he is too wrapped up and proud to see the failings in his own code and those close to him. I don't care for his defensive tone over ALSA either.
Edited 2009-10-26 23:00 UTC
Member since:
2008-05-26
Apple should really implement Ext4 using their own code; it should be fairly quick to do and it would be miles away better than HFS+.
I need two hands to count the number of times HFS+ has gone pear-shaped for me and I've lost data. That's not impressive at all. I shudder to think of what Leopard users must go through, considering that their operating system deletes files before putting them back on disk when you're just trying to save them.
And then when Btrfs comes out, Apple can nicely re-code that too.
But honestly, for god's sake, get rid of HFS+ and get rid of it SOON.