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

[snit@nevada.edu (Snit)]

Todd P. Whitesel enlightened us with: 
: 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...

Sadly, MacOS does still have the 32K limit.  And does claim to be
usable as a server.  Copland will (in thoery) get rid of this
miserable limitation, but that is still too far away to do me any good
(will it be out, tested, and developed on by Jan or Feb... didn't
think so).  So off to NT I go with my server.  Unless I want to go to
multiple partitions. A bit of a pain, but may be worth it.



: 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