HSF vs HSF+

[lashad]

im new to macs whats the differance

 

[Macpoops]

Not exactly sure of all the technical differences but longer file names and larger formatted drives. Think of it as the Transition between FAT16 vs. FAT32 in windows.

 

[VIREBEL661]

HFS is a much older standard; it stores data onto the disk in 16kb chunks... Thus, if you have a small text file, it'll take up 16kb no matter what.. HFS+ appeared in the middle, late 1990's (I think with OS 8)... It stores data in 4kb chunks... With all the small files contained in a modern Unix system like OS X, it's easy to see where you'll save a lot of disk space using it. The only real reason to format a drive in HFS is to make it compatable with older Macs, running system 7 or so - prolly pre PowerPC machines!

For all intents and purposes, this is similar to the FAT16, FAT32 difference in wintel...

See ya!

 

[VIREBEL661]

As far as I know, file name length was related to the operating system (OS 9 vs OS X), not the formatting of the drive FYI - just some info...

 

[Nermal]

Yeah, it's basically just like going from FAT16 to FAT32, the files use smaller chunks and partitions can be bigger. It was introduced with OS 8.1, but they weren't bootable until OS 8.5 I think.

Edit: That's not quite right, they were bootable with OS 8.1 if you had a PPC, but not if u had a 68K IIRC. I could never boot from them with my 68K anyway.

 

[bousozoku]

Hierarchial File System has been around since 1985, I believe, because the Macintosh File System couldn't handle hard drives. As Nermal said, HFS+ has been around since Mac OS 8.1.

File name length went from 30 characters to 256 but applications had to use the Carbon libraries to handle the longer names. The largest partition able to be formatted with HFS+ is 10 Terabytes, which is still quite a lot.