Re: hfs files

[Randy Shackelford <shack@onyx.southwind.net>]

Jeff Blakeney <CUTblakeney@home.com> wrote:

[snip]

: There are a couple reasons to not use HFS on the IIgs at present,
: though.  First and foremost is the lack of disk utilities for
: recovering from errors, undeleting files, sorting directories, et al.

Sorting directories is a non issue since HFS directories are B trees and
file entries are always alphabetical. The rest are easy to get around
if you have a Mac with Norton handy.

: The second reason is that it is horrendously slow.  I've only ever
: used HFS on 3.5" floppies a few times up to this point so it didn't
: matter much.  However, I now have an 880 MB HFS partition on my IIgs'
: hard drive and write to it is as slow, if not slower, than writing to
: a 5.25" floppy drive.

It could be tied to volume size. I have a 200 mb HFS volume and the speed
is acceptable.

: There has been some discussion about FSTs and disk utilites in the
: Apple II forum on Delphi and I recently started a thread in the A2Pro
: forum about upgrading and creating FSTs.  We are hoping to get some
: knowledgeable people together to finally figure out how FSTs work and
: to fix the existing FSTs and maybe create new ones.

: There was also some talk saying that it would be easier to write HFS
: disk utilities for the IIgs than to figure out how FSTs work.  This is
: probably true but it still won't make the HFS FST any faster so I
: personally would like to see a ProDOS like FST or a patch to the
: ProDOS FST that allowed larger volumes.

It would require an entire new file system since so much stuff in ProDOS
is hard coded to 32 mb volumes. I'd lean toward making HFS utilities and,
if people were to reach the point of writing FSTs, making a faster HFS.
There would be no point in making a new file system which no other platform
could understand when there's a perfectly good (and interoperable) system
already around. Plus that could be easier to implement than an FST for an
entirely different file system.
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