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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:
2005-09-02
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.