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UFS v HFS+ caution
Authored by: SOX on Jan 02, '03 10:57:41AM

While UFS has its uses I feel its probably not a good general recommendation for users switching to mac. In my view the primary needs UFS occur in two situations, one is if the mac is working as a disk server to Linux/sun/unix computers. There OS independent transparency to the external world may have priority. (indeed my xserves export their UFS partitions for this reason) The other is the rare case where the users are porting unix packages in such a wholsale fashion that they cannot anticiapte or correct name capitalization problems. In most circumstances, correcting filename capitalization is just one of many porting issues one needs to address, but not a good reason to abandon HFS+.

That being said, I would highly reccomend against not installing HFS+. First of all, apple does not support booting from UFS. SO while you may be able to boot your computer now, a single auto-upgrade could disable your computer. At various times, Airport and OS 9.0 have been broken by UFS. Moreover, on a mac UFS is slower and lacks some disk tools. Finally, when the new user goes elsewhere and uses another mac UFS will (likely) not be present.

Minimally, it is advisable to maintain a HFS+ partition for the OS and apps. But if you are going to do that, there is some logic to just learing to use HFS+. They are not all that different, that one cannot just get used to it, just as unix users have to get used to different dialects of unix.



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