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Save space on UFS volumes
Authored by: DavidRavenMoon on Jan 19, '05 04:40:40PM

I wouldn't recommend UFS for OS X either. It has no benefits as compared to HFS+ for running OS X, and generally the performance is worse.

It seems a lot of people want to use UFS thinking they are on a UNIX or Linux box, as if it makes the whole experience geekier.

Mac OS X wasn't designed to use swap partitions or UFS.

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G4/466, 1 GB, Mac OS X 10.3.7



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Save space on UFS volumes
Authored by: _merlin on Jan 19, '05 07:47:16PM

UFS, being a BSD-style file system, is more efficient space-wise for storing large numbers of very small files. It's also less prone to corruption when more than 90% full. Some software requires a case-sensitive file system, and will therefore work on UFS but not HFS+.

However, UFS is a lot slower than HFS+.



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Save space on UFS volumes
Authored by: DavidRavenMoon on Jan 20, '05 12:35:23PM
This is true, but pretty much only benefits when you are running BSD or some other UNIX OS. Whereas OS X has a BSD subsystem, it's not BSD and was designed to work with its native file system, which is HFS+. OS X already has a journaled file system, so corruption isn't much of an issue anymore, and the other features introduced with Panther, such as the optimizing, are absent in UFS.

Same holds true for dividing up your hard drive with UNIX/Linux style partitions. This is more work, and trouble, than it's worth, and was not the file system the OS was meant to operate with.

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G4/466, 1 GB, Mac OS X 10.3.7

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Save space on UFS volumes
Authored by: petri on Dec 10, '05 05:09:40PM

I think you're correct, but what I think what merlin meant is that UFS is a BSD-style file system in the sense that file systems could be divided into "families" of file systems. In this case, HFS+ would be a HFS-style, or Mac-style, file system. So, the efficiency of storing very many tiny files would thus depend on what style the file system was (in this case, merlin claims BSD-style fs'es win over HFS-style) without regard to however the OSX BSD subsystem is optimised. By the way, it seems to me like the BSD subsystem component is (mostly? only?) userland, which would mean that it doesn't really affect the fs driver's way of accessing files.

Also, the note about case-sensitive file names still applies.



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