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The first Mac filesystem was MFS.
It'd be more accurate to say that HFS+ is to HFS as NTFS is to HPFS (which is 16-bit, and 100% MS....why IBM went to JFS in later versions of OS/2). NTFS is 32-bit, includes journalling, is currently being developed and improved, etc. etc.
Still, having dealt with macs running HFS+ since 8.1 was brand new (afaik, one of those is still in use at my former job, doing ProTools work every day), I can say that it is a) fast, and b) very stable.
The first Mac filesystem was MFS.
I never said HFS was the first. I said it has been around forever. Wikipedia shows that HFS was introduced only a year after MFS (in 1985), so my point still stands.
NTFS is 32-bit, includes journalling, is currently being developed and improved, etc. etc.
IIRC, NTFS is based on HPFS, but is significantly different in many regards. NTFS is a a generalization of the HPFS design. HFS+, in contrast, keeps almost precisely the same structure as HFS, except it makes various control structures larger. Beyond that, HPFS is a far less primitive base for a modern filesystem design than HFS!
I can say that it is a) fast, and b) very stable.
I wouldn't call anything filesystem related on OS X "fast". It's hard to give numbers relative to other FSs on OS X, because its UFS implementation is poor, but compared to Linux on comparablely fast disks, OS X is much slower for things like compiles. Compiles exercise the filesystem much more heavily than media processing, since they touch a lot of metadata and a lot of small files, as opposed to just touching the extent maps in a few large files.
Speed aside, HFS+ is certainly a less interesting filesystem from an FS theory point of view than either ZFS or Reiser4.




Member since:
2005-07-06
HFS+ is simply an extension of the old HFS code. It's the same basic filesystem that's been in Macs forever, it's just that the block address sizes have been extended to cover larger filesystems. In a very real way, HFS+ is to HFS as FAT32 is to FAT16.