Is UFS a good idea?
I'm still waiting for my 320 GB LaCie Big Disk to arrive, and I'm wondering if maybe I should format it as UFS. The reason being I'm planning to install Linux next to MacOS X as soon as the drive arrives (I'll need to empty my iBooks drive first). So, I'm thinking if maybe UFS (Unix File System) is a better way to go in conjunction with Linux, and possibly with a 1394 equiped PC running Windows/Linux. Of course, I'm wondering if this would make its performance on OSX (which I plan on being my main OS for quite a while) take a hit. And would this make it impossible to mount the disk on OS9?
What's the word on the street?
What's the word on the street?
Comments
And also, I'm not sure if Linux can be installed on a 1394 drive. I tried it with YDL, and it wouldn't let me. Maybe another distribution can.
Originally posted by 1337_5L4Xx0R
Stay away from UFS. Use HFS+ for OSX. The latest kernels for PPC have HFS+ support so you can read and write to HFS+
Okay, but do i586 kernels also have HFS+ support? I'll most likely be setting up a hypercheap second-hand PC with Linux in the very near future, and I don't doubt that I'll want to use the disk on that box as well. Alternately, I guess I could partition the disk and format one partition in UFS, or some other flavor Linux might like. Still, I think it'd be nice to have my mp3 and AAC collection on just one partition, to be used by both these computers (I'm even thinking of hooking up the disk semi-permanently to that PC and accessing it over the network). Hm.
I formatted the drive with ReiserFS because it sounded cool and exported it with NFS. Mounting it in OS X was pretty easy and a google search turned up a bunch of howtos. I ran into some permissions problems that required a little administrative trickery, but it's been working fine since.
On a 100baseT LAN, I don't even notice the difference between playing mp3s locally and playing them over the network. Ogg Vorbis files load pretty slowly for some reason. I'm hoping some NFS performance tweaks will resolve that though.
Okay, but do i586 kernels also have HFS+ support? I'll most likely be setting up a hypercheap second-hand PC with Linux in the very near future, and I don't doubt that I'll want to use the disk on that box as well. Alternately, I guess I could partition the disk and format one partition in UFS, or some other flavor Linux might like. Still, I think it'd be nice to have my mp3 and AAC collection on just one partition, to be used by both these computers (I'm even thinking of hooking up the disk semi-permanently to that PC and accessing it over the network). Hm.
Yes, FS drivers are platform independent, so with RECENT kernels, like the last month or so, you can read/write to HFS and HFS+. Also, on the subject of FSes, I'm not sure I ever seen UFS support in the kernel.
Avoid UFS.
Keynote, oddly enough, would not run. The tech support guy actually had to waive the no-open-returns policy because the manual and web site did not specify this at all. (It surprised me, too, as Keynote is Cocoa--its themes, however, are not.)
The Panther beta installed well on the UFS disks of my computer and my sister's, but with a caveat: the Apple appeared for a great length of time, perhaps as long as five minutes. A boot in verbose mode revealed the time-consumptive process: the disk check. The fsck utility appears to require significantly longer to check UFS than to check HFS+. (Apple's UFS format, by the way, encodes resource forks into invisible Unix executable files.)
Other than Keynote and certain utilities as Drive 10 (a cheap piece of software, in my opinion*), I experienced no problems at all with UFS.
* I contacted Micromat and enquired about TechTool 4--it too will, despite being Cocoa, apparently not support UFS volumes when it comes out. Lazy cretins.
I suspect that, as Carbon disappears, less reason for HFS+ will exist. Although resource forks may (to my chagrin) always be supported somewhat, I suspect that, once we've made the transition to Unix-dom, many doors may open for us. Whilst some may argue that Apple might never allow its system to be installed out-of-the-box on an Intel box, I know little enough about the issue (:-D) to naïvely assume that they are simply holding back until the casual user won't be at the point where a vanishing resource fork would cause concern.