Re: HFS Utils?

[sheldon@atlcom.net (Sheldon Simms)]

In article <5cb05d$1nkg@uni.library.ucla.edu>, pubpc1@library.ucla.edu wrote:

> spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector) wrote:
> >
> >    Yes, at present there are no utilities whatsoever for working 
> >with HFS on the Apple IIgs. This means you cannot repair or even
> >optimize volumes...
>  ^^^^^^^^
> 
> There may be no utilities, but if you want to optimize, just copy
> your files to another HFS volume, erase your original HFS one, and
> copy the files back.  :)

Has anyone who regularly uses an HFS volume on the IIgs ever
optimized the volume (in whatever manner) and noticed an actual
improvement in disk access speed?

I ask because I dug out my "Inside Mac: Files" when this thread began
and read up on the HFS format. It seems to me that optimization is
unlikely to help very much because the way that the ProDOS File System
and by inheritance, GS/OS, finds files on the disk is not well suited
to the HFS format.

Using Mac file calls, a program needs only one traversal of the catalog
B-Tree to find any file on the disk. However it seems likely to me
that using HFS FST calls on a IIgs requires a traversal for every
directory in the full pathname of a file. This may explain why an HFS
volume seems so slow on even a accelerated IIgs while on even an very
old Mac its pretty quick.

-Sheldon

-- 
W. Sheldon Simms III - sheldon@atlcom.net