What is Better Mac os Extended or Unix File System??

[Shadowarrior]

When i was upgrading to Mac os X.1 it gave me choice between Mac Os Extended and Unix File System. I wanna Know wich one is the best? I am used to Windows And Linux so i choosed The Unix one. But let me know if i made the wrong choice?

 

[themacko]

I had the same question in the middle of my reformat/install of 10.1, so I sent an email to our campus Mac Guru and he told me just to use the Mac OS because it was more compatable if I ever wanted to share files on a network with other Macs or Windows machines. Also, if you still have OS 9.x on a different partition, while in 9 you won't be able to use files located on the UNIX partition.

I'm not sure if thats true, but it made sense at the time so I went with the Mac OS Extended.

 

[Gaige]

Generally speaking, you want to use HFS Extended when you install MacOS X.

Being a long time UNIX user (and a long-time Mac user as well, might I add... had a "first 100 days Macintosh"), I figured that when I did a clean install of MacOS X back this summer, I'd install it in "real UNIX" mode. Hence, I did the install with the UNIX file system. To run my MacOS 9 apps, I used a second disk drive with HFS Extended on it.

This works, but it can be annoying. In particular:
- Classic won't find infromation on UNIX partitions
- A number of the installers out there won't allow you to install on UNIX partitions because they incorrectly identify them as "Server Volumes" (my most annoying example is the beta of Retrospect.

I haven't found any advantage except the ability to have "really long" file names. This can be helpful if you are trying to bring in software from UNIX that has these.

On the other hand, my PowerBook (Ti) which I had installed X on in August, runs just great with the Extended file system.

I'd definitely suggest you stick with HFS Extended.

 

[howardm4]

Just be aware of the fact that if you use HFS+, the
file system is case-preserving but NOT case-sensitive.
So, if you have 'makefile' and 'Makefile' in the directory, you will
see both but in fact they point to the same disk object.

Can cause a problem on certain things (like compiling PERL)

 

[LordOphidian]

Acutually HFS+ supports the same length of filenames as UFS does. The main advantages to UFS are that it is case-sensitive (not just case preserving) and that it supposidly is slightly faster. I say supposidly becuase from what I hear it used to be faster, but the Apple implementations of it were some what lacking in this respect at first, but they have been getting better I am told. So it remains to be seen if its actually faster in its current state.

That said, apart from the problem that classic can't see my UFS drive, my OS X install on UFS is comming along just fine, runs like a champ and seems pretty speedy. Oh, and if you like to rename your drives you won't like the UFS option, since the drive name is by default (and unchangeable) set to '/', for Unix reasons. With HFS+ they proxy the '/' directory, but on UFS its a true root (and hence unchangeable).