Hacker News Reader

Comment by Derbasti | Hacker News Reader

I think its funny how Apple tries to solve its file system issues with SSDs. No other popular file system will get quite as unbearably slow when in heavy use as HFS+. No other file system will just randomly create errors and little corruptions here and there in regular use. No other popular OS will come to a complete halt as soon as it starts swapping because its file system can't handle it.

And instead of fixing that stuff, Apple is pushing SSDs to everyone. Way of the future.

View on HN

Sorry but none of what you said is true.

There may be bugs and bugs in the past. But there is no systemic "this FS will lose data under heavy use" design fault. If there was then millions of people would have been affected.

And of course Apple is pushing SSD to fix a FS bug not because it is 10x faster and 1/4 the size of a mobile HDD.

HFS is producing errors all the time. Run Disk Utility to see them. They may not be fatal, but they happen.

Apple computers with HDDs do get unusably slow once they start swapping. So much so that it is usually impossible to terminate the memory-hungry application. With SSDs the computer becomes usable again. Just ask some plastic MacBook users.

So, what exactly is untrue about what I said? Just claiming that it is not is not very productive.

I've owned plenty of Macs, even my G4 with 256mb RAM was still usable, surprisingly, under Tiger. Generally I didn't find it to have the issue you mention, or find it slower than windows

Of course SSD's have a benefit. But I think your particular MacBook may have had a failing drive.

So, what exactly is untrue about what I said?

Potentially nothing, but it is all anecdotal. Where's the widespread or researched evidence of HFS (especially in its HFS+ or HFSX variants) being a slow and easily corruptible file system?

It's not like HFS is a rare and infrequently used file system – it's the primary filesystem for all Macs since System 3, for many iPods, and for all iOS devices.

The scaling limits present in HFS+ will rarely be hit by most users and, while not as resilient as more modern FSs, there are no inherent fatal design flaws with HFS that I'm aware of. Perhaps you've pushed HFS+ beyond its limits, or have usage patterns that trigger a rare fatal bug, but just claiming that something is true is not very productive either.

I work at a computer repair shop while at school, and we have a 54% use of Mac vs Other computer at our school. I am going to tell you that 90% of Macs that come in require a complete format because the filesystem has been completely corrupted and that there is no hope of data retrieval. The only time this happens to any other operating systems harddrives when they come in is when they've been dropped down the stairs.

On many occasions, I tried to load some data set that would not fit in memory. Usually on accident. If I do that on Windows or Linux, the computer becomes slow, I cancel the operation, and everything is well again. Same with OS X and an SSD. On OS X with an HDD, the computer becomes completely unresponsive with no recovery beyond a forced reboot.

This happened particularly frequently with virtual machines and/or Matlab, both of which can very easily exhaust any amount of memory. But maybe no one else is doing stuff like that.

> This happened particularly frequently with virtual machines and/or Matlab, both of which can very easily exhaust any amount of memory. But maybe no one else is doing stuff like that.

I used to do a lot of heavy VM work on OSX - and back in the early days of VMWare Fusion v1 and later. I have never had the OS become unstable due to a storage bottleneck/thrashing.

Not that OSX is unbreakable, but it's been a whole lot better/more stable than my experience with Windows. At least on the Mac, a large chunk of the drivers are supported by the folks who wrote the OS.

> Apple computers with HDDs do get unusably slow once they start swapping. So much so that it is usually impossible to terminate the memory-hungry application.

I agree with the former but not the latter - avoiding swapping made a much bigger performance difference in OS X to Windows, but a swapping app never completely locked up. I have found, though, that an app using 100% CPU can lock up the system to the point where it's impossible to terminate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com