[stuppy]

Hi guys.

Im a recent convert to Macs. I am just in the process of converting my 2 external hard drives to the HFS+ file format.

What exactly are the benefits that HFS+ has over FAT32 when working on Macs?

[TimmyDee51]

Well, HFS+ is the native file format, so that means your disks can have journaling enabled for one. Also, I think (and I'm no filesystem expert, but I've done some reading) it allows for more efficient storage, the storage of larger files, longer filenames, and probably some other stuff I don't know. That said, you lose the ability to use them with a PC that is lacking MacDrive.

FWIW, I would move to HFS+ just for the peace of mind that if anything goes wrong with the directories, DiskWarrior is there to save you.

[msuper69]

Originally Posted by TimmyDee51

...
FWIW, I would move to HFS+ just for the peace of mind that if anything goes wrong with the directories, DiskWarrior is there to save you.

Except for the fact that DiskWarrior isn't MacIntel compatible yet.

[ghporter]

FAT 32 is decent for storage of noncritical files. But with all the added features of HFS+, it's much more robust and less likely to suffer from corruption than FAT 32. The FAT architecture is, to be blunt, more primitive than HFS+.

HFS+ is a step or two beyond NTFS because it has more features and better developed support (journaling is part of NTFS, for example, but it's not as smooth in how it works, so you may be able to restore a server's drive, but not necessarily a workstation's drive).

Also note that Macs can READ but NOT WRITE to NTFS partitions, while they can read and write to FAT 32 partitions.

[Moose]

Originally Posted by ghporter

HFS+ is a step or two beyond NTFS because it has more features and better developed support

Quantify, please. What features does HFS+ have that NTFS lacks?

Originally Posted by ghporter

(journaling is part of NTFS, for example, but it's not as smooth in how it works, so you may be able to restore a server's drive, but not necessarily a workstation's drive).

Journaling itself is not a data restoration feature. It just means that if your computer goes down unexpectedly, the filesystem itself will be consistent.

[CharlesS]

HFS+ vs. Fat32

That's not exactly a tournament of champions you've got there.

[wataru]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

That's not exactly a tournament of champions you've got there.

Actually, apparently FAT32 wins...

[Big Mac]

Not anymore. . .

The OP asked what advantages there are to using HFS+ over FAT32 on a Mac, not HFS+ versus FAT32 in general. There are many advantages because HFS+ is the Mac's native filesystem. The only reason to ever use FAT32 is if you're going to be sharing a drive with a PC.

[stuppy]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

That's not exactly a tournament of champions you've got there.

You know something, i've read some of your posts lately, and you are the most arrogant self absorbed prick I have come across in recent years. You poke fun at the simplest of questions like EVERYONE is supposed to know the answers to everything. I would put money on it that your lack of a decent reply means that you know **** all about either of the file systems and therefore you post some idiotic comment to belittle other posters and make yourself look like the god of knowledge.

Forums would be a lot better place without knob heads like you.


Thanks for the info to those who posted mature comments. My drives are all formatted to Mac OS Extended (Journlaed). That is HFS+ right?

Thanks

[wataru]

Some people on here actually are jackasses, like me. Some people are knowledgeable and helpful, like CharlesS. Please don't confuse us.

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by stuppy

You know something, i've read some of your posts lately, and you are the most arrogant self absorbed prick I have come across in recent years. You poke fun at the simplest of questions like EVERYONE is supposed to know the answers to everything.

He's not making fun of anybody. He's talking about the filesystems, both of which have their flaws.

However, between HFS+ and FAT32, there really isn't much of a contest: the only advantage FAT32 has is that HFS+ can't easily be used on Windows machines. Both can be used with most other operating systems.

Honestly, HFS+ wins for most other tasks, but there are two areas where it really outshines FAT32:

• Reliability. Although HFS+ is not truly a journaled filesystem, it is often mistaken for one because it supports softupdates, which perform basically the same task. FAT32 has neither of these.
  
  What this means is that when Bad Stuff happens to your filesystem -such as a "dirty" shutdown of the computer- HFS+ is more likely to be able to recover with no trouble, while FAT32 often requires tools like ScanDisk to clean up the mess.
• Filenames. HFS+ supports many more characters in its filenames, both in kind and in number. In terms of kind, you can use almost any character Unicode supports: the only truly forbidden characters are : (colon) and / (forward-slash, but note that backslash is allowed). Windows forbids these characters too, but it also forbids many more.
  
  That's not really all that much of an advantage, in and of itself. However, there's another advantage which is more important. HFS+ filenames can be up to 256 Unicode characters, no matter where on disk the file resides. FAT32, on the other hand, restricts filenames to 255 bytes, and the full path to the file counts toward that limit. This has two ramifications. First, because it limits based on bytes rather than characters, some characters (including anything that's not in regular 7-bit ASCII) will count more towards the limit than others. More important, however, is that because the full path counts toward the limit, the "space" you have available for filenames actually shrinks as you go deeper into the folder hierarchy.

You may hear that HFS+ is slower than FAT32. That's true in some cases, but not in others. In particular, HFS+ does not do very well in tasks where you need to access many small files at once. E-mail servers and Web servers are two examples of cases where this can be a problem. HFS+ doesn't break under conditions like these, but it can be slow.

For looking up individual files, however, HFS+ is actually one of the fastest filesystems out there, and has been for a long time. This all comes from the way that HFS+ stores its data: when you're working with relatively few files it's better, but when you're working with many files at once it isn't as good. It's a design tradeoff, and whether it will be better or worse for you in this regard really depends on how you use your computer.

The original Macintosh File System (MFS, from which HFS and then HFS+ directly descend) was created in an era when most people used floppies to store all of their data. The same is true of FAT16, which is where FAT32 comes from. Apple's engineers decided that since floppies were so slow, people and applications would try to minimize disk access in general, and so they optimized their filesystem to work best under those conditions. It worked extraordinarily well for the time, and even today there aren't many better filesystems for people who work under those conditions.

In other words, unless you plan to hook your drives directly up to Windows machines from time to time, there is no reason to use FAT32 and quite a few good reasons not to. If you have to share files with Windows machines, you should strongly consider using a small network for this purpose anyway. Aside from letting you use whichever filesystem is best for each individual computer (HFS+ on Macs, NTFS on Windows), it also means you don't have to go around unplugging and re-plugging disks.

And one last thing: note that I mentioned NTFS for Windows. If you can use this filesystem on your Windows machines, you should. It has many of the same advantages HFS+ does.

Thanks for the info to those who posted mature comments. My drives are all formatted to Mac OS Extended (Journlaed). That is HFS+ right?

That's correct.

[PurpleGiant]

[dice]

Originally Posted by wataru

Some people on here actually are jackasses, like me. Some people are knowledgeable and helpful, like CharlesS. Please don't confuse us.

you calling yourself a jackass?

Anywho, I have my external 300gb disk partitioned with both Fat32 and HFS+. The HFS+ partition being the larger of the two. The reason I have the FAT32 partition is occasionally I need to connect it to a Windows machine. I tried third party HFS+ extensions for windows but they didnt work very well...

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by stuppy

You know something, i've read some of your posts lately. . .

stuppy, you may have misinterpreted Charles' post, but he wasn't being critical of your or your question. He was making a statement about the two filesystems you were comparing, and he was just saying that neither of them are that terrific. Charles is one of the most knowledgeable contributors here.

[Macola]

I'm glad this discussion came up because yesterday, I had an external FAT32 disk (connected by FireWire to my MacBook) get corrupted. I use it to store my work files that are used by both OS X and Windows.

I couldn't get the disk to mount, so I took it to my PowerBook and tried to run Diskwarrior, then realized that it doesn't fix FAT32 volumes. I ended up booting into Windows on my MacBook and running Norton DiskDoctor (yes, you heard that right) which fixed the problem.

Fortunately, I have daily backups so I would have lost (at most) one day's work. However, I keep looking for a better solution. Ideally, Diskwarrior would run on Intel Macs and work with FAT32 volumes, but until then, is there a better solution?

[Hi I'm Ben]

I might be blind but I don't see anywhere posted about how FAT32 doesn't support file sizes over 4 gbs. It's really not fun imaging my HD in pieces.

[Moose]

Originally Posted by Hi I'm Ben

I might be blind but I don't see anywhere posted about how FAT32 doesn't support file sizes over 4 gbs. It's really not fun imaging my HD in pieces.

You should probably read this.

Edit:

Oh.

You already knew.

But yeah. That's part of Microsoft's, "Hey, dickwad. Upgrade to NTFS" strategy.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by Moose

You should probably read this.

Edit:

Oh.

You already knew.

But yeah. That's part of Microsoft's, "Hey, dickwad. Upgrade to NTFS" strategy.

More likely their "this is new so we'll just forget the old stuff" strategy. I wouldn't give MS credit for actually thinking about this as a plan.

My comment about journaling was more about how NTFS can be used by Windows-sure, the file system will stay consistent in case of a shutdown, but the workstation version of the OS won't necessarily be able to keep track of that-the Registry, for example, can get completely hosed by a sudden shutdown in spite of the fact that the file system itself is intact and no data is truly lost. I supposed I didn't phrase that part very well... I meant more that the file system as a part of the overall context of the OS is not properly used and thus, notwithstanding the technical merits of the file system, the whole package isn't as robust as HFS+ and OS X. Thanks for keeping me from misleading others with my poorly phrased statement. I shoulda quit when I was behind!

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by stuppy

You know something, i've read some of your posts lately, and you are the most arrogant self absorbed prick I have come across in recent years. You poke fun at the simplest of questions like EVERYONE is supposed to know the answers to everything. I would put money on it that your lack of a decent reply means that you know **** all about either of the file systems and therefore you post some idiotic comment to belittle other posters and make yourself look like the god of knowledge.

Forums would be a lot better place without knob heads like you.

Um, okay...

Originally Posted by wataru

Some people on here actually are jackasses, like me. Some people are knowledgeable and helpful, like CharlesS. Please don't confuse us.

Nah, I rather enjoy your posts, except on a few certain topics.

Originally Posted by Millennium

[*]Reliability. Although HFS+ is not truly a journaled filesystem, it is often mistaken for one because it supports softupdates, which perform basically the same task. FAT32 has neither of these.

What this means is that when Bad Stuff happens to your filesystem -such as a "dirty" shutdown of the computer- HFS+ is more likely to be able to recover with no trouble, while FAT32 often requires tools like ScanDisk to clean up the mess.

HFS+ isn't that great for speed or reliability, although it is better than FAT32.

Rixstep

It'll be nice when Apple inevitably comes up with a new file system, because none of the current options are all that great. HFS+ is definitely better to use than FAT32 on a Mac, but neither is a great file system by modern standards.

[ghporter]

Any current file system will have detractors because it's impossible for any product to be perfect for everyone's ideas of their needs. I, for one, cannot wait for the flying car that Walter Cronkite promised some 40 years ago that I'd have by now, so my car isn't ideal for my needs. But it's what I have, and for what it can do, it's pretty darn good.

Of course by the time they finish the highway upgrades around here I WILL have my flying car and won't need the roads...

[tooki]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

HFS+ isn't that great for speed or reliability, although it is better than FAT32.

I'm not sure I agree with that. Especially since the release of journaled HFS+, reliability has been great. Even before, it wasn't bad. NTFS is undoubtedly a superior filesystem (many are!), but in practice, it doesn't seem to protect users all that much: subjectively, it seems to me that Windows corrupts its disks with great frequency, despite NTFS's pedigree.

tooki

[CharlesS]

The journaling definitely helps, but it doesn't change the fact that the underlying file system isn't the most reliable around. And before, it wasn't so bad, as long as you didn't let it get too full. If the disk got close at all to being full, it was pretty much guaranteed that the file system would get messed up. Even with the journaling on, I've seen HFS+ get corrupted a few times.

I don't think anyone would be sad to see HFS+ go if we were to get a new file system, as long as the new one also supported the two nice features that HFS+ provides - file IDs and resource forks.

[P]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

I don't think anyone would be sad to see HFS+ go if we were to get a new file system, as long as the new one also supported the two nice features that HFS+ provides - file IDs and resource forks.

Lots of file systems support multiple forks - NTFS for one - but they aren't used by the operating system. File IDs is more of a filesystem driver implementation issue - there are inode numbers for all files on UFS that you could theoretically use in the same manner as you use File IDs on HFS+.

[CharlesS]

That's true, but as I understand it, the inode numbers are more fragile than HFS+ file IDs. Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't the inode numbers get changed during an operation such as a defrag?

[Angus_D]

Originally Posted by stuppy

You know something, i've read some of your posts lately, and you are the most arrogant self absorbed prick I have come across in recent years

Says he with 33 posts. CharlesS is one of the good guys. He made a valid point. Both HFS+ and FAT32 are quite old and crufty.

[mduell]

Why can't we all just switch to zfs?

[Simon]

Originally Posted by mduell

Why can't we all just switch to zfs?

Golly! You're, right!

Call Steve, tell him his engineers don't have a clue and give him the link to this thread. That'll show em.

[P]

Originally Posted by CharlesS

That's true, but as I understand it, the inode numbers are more fragile than HFS+ file IDs. Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't the inode numbers get changed during an operation such as a defrag?

Probably - but as I said, that's a driver implementation issue. If you decided to use inode numbers like you do File IDs, you'd have to take care of something like that, as well as some sort of quarantine for inode numbers of recently deleted files (I think File IDs are never reused until the drive is reformatted). I'm sure it could be done for the current UFS driver, but it's probably better to just implement a more modern filesystem like zfs or something and add whatever Mac-features you want on top of it.

[P]

Originally Posted by Simon

Golly! You're, right!

Call Steve, tell him his engineers don't have a clue and give him the link to this thread. That'll show em.

They do have a clue.