Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

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Here's the thing. I used FAT16 for years and years and years and never had a problem. I used FAT32 for the majority of a decade and never had a problem. I used NTFS for a number of years and never had a problem.

While NFS+ isn't quite as bad right now, I can tell you that the 10.4-10.5 days it seem to enjoy corrupting files. You rebooted your computer? Here's a couple of missing files in your trash. Hope you can find what binary thing on your multi hundred gigabyte disk they fit in.

NFS+ is the ONLY filesystem I have ever used that I have lost bits of data on from silent corruption. I don't trust it. I would kill for Apple to adopt ZFS or NTFS. At this point I want it check summing all of my files and my filesystem so I know that it's not being corrupted silently by the OS making weird mistakes on a filesystem that should've been replaced 10 years ago and is just hack after hack on a system designed for a computer that only had 128 K of memory.

I love everything about OS X. Except HFS plus, which needs to die in a fire.

Nothing is quite as much fun as looking at an old picture or listening to a song I haven't listened to in quite a while just to find that it's actually silently corrupted and has been for multiple years and I probably don't have the correct version on a backup.

I'd trust ext2 over HFS+.

Yes, I'm bitter.

>I used FAT16 for years and years and years and never had a problem. I used FAT32 for the majority of a decade and never had a problem

>I'd trust ext2 over HFS+.

>Yes, I'm bitter.

Unfortunately not only bitter but bitter to the point of senseless argument just of the sake of argument. Trusting a non-journaled FS over a journaled without error correction/detection is a bad choice, like career-limiting bad. And if you never had problems with FATXX then you most likely never used DOS or old Windows seriously. Corrupted data and specifically corrupted MBR was really frequent back then (like corrupted b-trees on the Mac side)

It's journaled now. I used DOS and Windows for years and never had any real problems (well, on hard drives, floppies were more vulnerable).

Most journals are metadata-only, so they save you from corrupt directories but don't protect contents at all. NTFS loves to wipe out just-written files when I lose power, for example. Files that previously existed, mind you, now suddenly garbage.

> And if you never had problems with FATXX then you most likely never used DOS or old Windows seriously

Ah, the joy of "ghost" folders that ended up containing themselves...

Afaik, around Mac OS X 10.5 had native ZFS support (but not as boot partition).

And there is http://code.google.com/p/maczfs/ and http://downloads.maczfs.org/

They promised it at WWDC when they announced 10.5, but silently scraped the feature before release.

ZFS was never promised as the way forward for the default filesystem on consumer machines.

The truth is despite all the Siracusa "We Want ZFS" nonsense, it's an absolutely terrible choice for a consumer filesystem. All of the nice features come at the cost of it eating an enormous amount of RAM and CPU resources, and it's integrity guarantees are meaningless if the machine isn't running ECC RAM anyways.

Apple was never going to ship laptops running 10.5 where 4 Gigs of RAM were immediately eaten by the filesystem and battery life was halved from 10.4 due to the extra CPU load. ZFS as the default for OS X was always pipe-dream nonsense promoted by people with no understanding of or experience with ZFS.

I still trust non-ECC RAM a lot more than my disk.

And equally you're over exaggerating the demands ZFS has; it runs quite happily on lower end hardware. Granted you need a 64bit CPU, but all Macs are shipped with one anyway. And unless you have deduping et al turned on (which you don't really want on a desktop anyway), the CPU load would be minimal. You could probably even get away without compression as well (though the modern algorithms ZFS supports are pretty light on the CPU).

As for memory, the minimum you need for pre-fetching is 2GB of free RAM. ZFS will, however, run on less with pre-fetching turned off.

The thing with ZFS is that it will consume your RAM and CPU if you have all the uber features enabled and a boat load of pools created, but since you don't need nor want that on a desktop, ZFS shouldn't need to be that resource hungry.

What's more, part of the misconception of ZFS's bloat comes from the age of the file system. My original ZFS server was less powerful than most budget laptops these days (and I was running a small number of VMs off that thing as well)! So modern systems definitely do have the resources to run ZFS as their desktop fs.

Behold what I believe is the spiritual successor and which I'm going to play around with pretty soon: https://openzfsonosx.org/

HFS+ hasn't exactly failed me spectacularly, but I'll be more at ease with my sensitive and valuable data on ZFS.

NTFS isn't a single bit better than HFS+ in terms of checksums.

Also, HFS wasn't used on the original Macintosh 128K -- that used a simpler filesystem called MFS. HFS was introduced with the Mac Plus a couple of years later.

NTFS may not checksum everything, but I also never had it silently corrupt my files and helpfully provide me the 'missing parts' when I rebooted.

The most terrible thing with silent corruption is that, unless you verify your data, you'll never know it happened because it's, well, silent.

Have you checksummed your files lately?

I've experienced silent corruption on NTFS. And it still modifies data in-place, so an unlucky power failure or reboot could still cause data loss. Thankfully Microsoft already have an answer, ReFS: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh84...

Silent corruption can hit NTFS just as well. The only protection is to have a good hardware with ECC RAM, raid with redundancy and a FS that checks data on every read like zfs,btrfs,ReFS,... and backups.

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