Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 23rd Oct 2009 21:13 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
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
i also hightly rate NTFS, as ive used that with some heavy duty file operations with both small files and large files and even after quite a few crashes the NTFS keeps going. The only thing i would say about NTFS is that sometimes it likes to fragment itself quite badly.
Another thing about NTFS is that it rarely goes belly-up but when it does it does so in a rather spectacular way. Ever had your cluster bitmap become corrupted, i.e. the section of the mft that tells the fs which space is used and which is free? When that information gets out of sync you essentially face the issue of disappearing files, because the fs is writing over files that have gotten marked as free space and updating the mft accordingly. the mft and cluster bitmap itself can be fixed rather easily, but there's no real way to undo the damage it has already done except to restore from a backup. Of course, if you run a mission-critical server, no matter what fs, and don't have a working backup then you're asking for whatever misfortune you get.
Member since:
2006-07-25
I have to agree, my macbook suffered a HFS+ file system fault which FSCK and other checks could not fix, even tried booting off the disc. I had to reformat, reinstall and then restore to get it running ok. Corrupted a lot of data for no reason. The laptop hadn't been switched off without a shutdown, it just developed a fault.
ZFS is one of the best FS's However i also hightly rate NTFS, as ive used that with some heavy duty file operations with both small files and large files and even after quite a few crashes the NTFS keeps going. The only thing i would say about NTFS is that sometimes it likes to fragment itself quite badly.