HFS+ not ready for OS X?

gambitgambit
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
OS X was designed to get beat on. It's a Unix-based OS that was developed with the thoughts in mind that this OS was going to be rock-solid no matter what was run on it or done to it, and that this OS was gonna have a much better uptime than OS 9 could even dream of. Yet, yesterday, after an amazing uptime of almost two weeks, my lap top died on me. Turned out, the directories had become so currupted, that OS X had lost a few major files, therefore couldn't boot. Even when disk warrior was run on it, OS X still wouldn't boot. It hit me then (though it wasn't the first time this had occured to me), maybe OS X was rock-solid, but I don't think HFS+ was designed for that kind of beating. I bet you anything that if any of y'all reading this were to run disk warrior or Norton on your OS X disks, you'll also find major errors. I would, under normal circumstances, find that odd, but I beleive that even Apple knows of the problem. I believe this because they're moving away from metadata, one of the benefits of HFS+. If they're trying to convince developers away from metadata, maybe they're writing a new file system for OS X that doesn't support metadata but is much more effecient/reliable for OS X. Seems to me like that makes sense. Any thoughts?



Mike

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    amorphamorph Posts: 7,112member
    Metadata has nothing to do with filesystem reliability. Nor does the "forked" nature of HFS+ files. As far as I can tell, there are simply bugs in the OS X implementation. There were a lot in 10.0, there are still some in 10.1, etc. It's a work in progress.
  • Reply 2 of 8
    tomahawktomahawk Posts: 178member
    I've found major errors on every file system we've ever used on every operating system we've had.



    Errors happen. The best we can hope for is that Apple can make OS X prevent the errors more often.
  • Reply 3 of 8
    hekalhekal Posts: 117member
    Look at NTFS.
  • Reply 4 of 8
    ghost_user_nameghost_user_name Posts: 22,667member
    I think you've got it backwards. OSX isn't ready for HFS+. This is obvious by the lack of metadata and elimination of forked files in OSX.



    Click my signature.



    The problem you had is nothing related just to OSX having problems with HFS+. Trust me, these things happen just as frequently in OS9. All file systems have problems. Any file system came be corrupted. Like it or not, no file system is perfect. Some are better than HFS+ is some respects, but I'll leave that argument to someone else.
  • Reply 5 of 8
    gusgus Posts: 3member
    [quote]Originally posted by starfleetX:

    <strong>I think you've got it backwards. OSX isn't ready for HFS+. This is obvious by the lack of metadata and elimination of forked files in OSX.



    Click my signature.



    The problem you had is nothing related just to OSX having problems with HFS+. Trust me, these things happen just as frequently in OS9. All file systems have problems. Any file system came be corrupted. Like it or not, no file system is perfect. Some are better than HFS+ is some respects, but I'll leave that argument to someone else.</strong><hr></blockquote>



    I wonder how difficult it would be to implement ext3 on MOSX? That's the new journalling (kind of) filesystem used in the latest version of SUSE Linux (and there's a PPC version too!). It sounds pretty secure *and* it's very fast. What would we want more...
  • Reply 6 of 8
    synsyn Posts: 329member
    BFS and SGi's XFS both trounce ext3 in terms of speed and support journaling... XFS is opensource and it would be *sweet* to have OSX running on top of it.
  • Reply 7 of 8
    razzfazzrazzfazz Posts: 728member
    [quote]Originally posted by Gus:

    <strong>I wonder how difficult it would be to implement ext3 on MOSX? That's the new journalling (kind of) filesystem used in the latest version of SUSE Linux (and there's a PPC version too!). It sounds pretty secure *and* it's very fast. What would we want more... </strong><hr></blockquote>



    Just getting OS X' UFS implementation to support Soft Updates (as seen in FreeBSD) would help a lot in the speed department too, and in addition is probably a lot easier to do than porting ext3 completely.



    Byem

    RazzFazz
  • Reply 8 of 8
    gambitgambit Posts: 475member
    I think Apple may be eliminating forked files and metadata because they MAY BE coming out with a new file system for OS X. Again, this could be why they're encouraging developers to move away from said benefits of HFS+. Also could be why OS X doesn't seem to play as nice with HFS+ as 9 did.
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