Subject: UFS
From: Timothy A. Seufert (tas@mindspring.com)
Date: Wed Mar 27 2002 - 18:06:01 MST
At 3:08 PM -0600 3/27/02, Richard Petty wrote:
>I don't know anything about the lowendmac mailing list, but I sorta have to
>speak up when I see rumor replace fact.
>
>For the record, UFS is a fine file system. In fact, I recently reformatted
>an 80-gig drive on my home server, going from HFS+ to UFS owing to
>limitations of HFS+ (and I'm an HFS+ fan!)
>
>My home Mac OS X system boots off an UFS partition very nicely, too.
>
>So far, the major disadvantage to UFS is that I don't get to pay Norton
>any money.
UFS is indeed a fine file system, but the problem is that the MacOS X
implementation of it is kind of stale because Apple expects users to
use HFS+ only. MacOS X UFS is not necessarily as fast as MacOS X
HFS+, and some have reported bugginess to boot.
Additionally, there is a lot of MacOS X software which breaks on UFS,
including some that is installed with the OS. The upper layers of
MacOS X are partially descended from "classic" MacOS. Many programs
which go through that part of the system expect HFS/HFS+ file system
features, and therefore break if the system is installed on a UFS FS.
As always, your mileage may vary. But I personally would never
advise somebody to install a MacOS X system on UFS -- there are
enough lurking issues to make it questionable. Even if you need UFS
semantics for some specific tasks, it may be a better idea to leave
the system on a HFS+ partition while using a UFS disk image or UFS
partition for the files which need to be on UFS.
(I've run into HFS+ problems too -- I have a CVS archive that breaks
on HFS+ because it has directories whose names differ only in case,
causing them to overwrite each other when the archive is checked out
onto a HFS+ FS.)
You don't have to pay Norton any money to use HFS+. Defragmenting is
vastly overrated as a prophylactic and performance improvement.
-- Tim Seufert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Wed Mar 27 2002 - 18:24:56 MST