Originally posted by sepia
Depends on what you're doing. If you are going to be doing a lot of Darwin work, UFS will be more friendly to any UNIX software you install. If not, go with HFS. I've heard it's actually faster. Can anyone confirm this? I know HFS is a lot faster when doing file searches. Plus, you can't index a UFS volume.
This isn't scientific by any means, (because of the difference between the PB and the final),
but my subjective experience is that certain "pure" Unix apps are faster (or at least
tremendously more convenient) from a UFS volume than from an HFS+ volume.
My OSX PB system was set up as a single large HFS+ volume. I run the
small-site Usenet server software Leafnode (
http://www.leafnode.org),
which creates literally tens of thousands of small files (every Usenet post
is a file). Under the PB, if I had an unclean shutdown it could
take as long as 2.5 hours to start up if fsck_hfs had to be run.
When I installed the final, I knew I wanted a seperate UFS volume to hold my news spool,
if nothing else. I haven't had an unclean shutdown in the final yet (yay!), but I would
definitely say that Leafnode seems faster in day-today actions
(downloading and serving articles) with its spool on the UFS volume.
UFS is certainly way slower when dealing with dual-forked files, however, as it has
to simulate them with hidden directory hocus-pocus.
