Re: Patch for **MAJOR** HFS.FST Bug

[toddpw@wrath.ugcs.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel)]

snit@nevada.edu (Snit) writes:

>One big weakness of HFS, at least on the MacOS, is that it has a
>functional limit of 32K files.  I run a server which is hitting that
>limit.  Really wish Apple would come up with a fix.  My alternatives
>are to use mult partitions (a pain in the rump) or go to NT.  Sigh.

Yah hah!! ProDOS, HFS, and MS-DOS all use 16-bit logical block numbers.
That means 64K files maximum no matter what you do, and usually less.

ProDOS lets you get really close to the maximum, but can't have logical
blocks larger than physical ones, so you're stuck at 32Megs per filesystem.
(Physical blocks are half a Kbyte.)

HFS takes a fair amount of overhead for directories, and may impose a 32K
limit on the number of files, but I'm not sure (been a while since I read
the tech note). You can get huge volumes, but as the volume gets bigger
the logical blocks get bigger and so does your minimum size file...

MS-DOS started out like ProDOS but was later hacked to add large logical
blocks ("clusters"). You get the best of both space efficiency and large
volumes, but the basic underlying filesystem sucks the most of all three...

All three of these are for _personal_ computers, nobody ever said they made
sense for servers... :)

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ ugcs.caltech.edu