Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

eclecticlight.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 152 posts

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#61

Post by dataflow »

dist-epoch wrote: post #55
dataflow wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK that's an incorrect meme that just won't die. The performance issues you're thinking of have nothing to do with the filesystem itself, but with the I/O subsystem in Windows more generally. If you have evidence otherwise please share.

Microsoft itself admits there are performance issues with NTFS, which is one reason they created ReFS. For example ReFS removed the MFT which caused various problems.

I'm on my phone and this is a longer discussion than I can have here, but the performance problems they're thinking of and the ones people usually rant about on these forums are not the same ones (or same magnitude). Before being so confident it's NTFS itself that's the issue, try ReFS (and FAT32 for that matter) and tell me if you see the performance problems you've encountered actually improve a lot. And then narrow down the cause. You might be surprised how much of it had to do e.g. with filter drivers or other things. And don't forget you're still testing one particular implementation on one OS, which doesn't say anything about a different one for the same filesystem on a different OS.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#64

Post by gjsman-1000 »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #50
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ext4 and Btrfs are only well supported on Linux; they are not universal standards. NTFS was only supported well on Windows until recently; but extensions like NTFS Encryption (BitLocker) are still Windows only. Mac still does not let you write to an NTFS volume. APFS and HFS+ are obviously Apple file systems. FreeBSD does not support ext4 or Btrfs well; but instead prefers UFS2 or ZFS despite also being an open-sourc…

> NTFS was only supported well on Windows until recently I remember using ntfs-3g without any issues on my first Linux laptop 15 years ago. So that's not really "recently".

I intentionally excluded unofficial or third party software, as almost anything is supported if you’re brave enough. The quality of said drivers also wildly varies.

Until 4 years ago, nothing was good enough for the upstream Linux kernel.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#65

Post by dist-epoch »

dataflow wrote: post #61
dist-epoch wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft itself admits there are performance issues with NTFS, which is one reason they created ReFS. For example ReFS removed the MFT which caused various problems.

I'm on my phone and this is a longer discussion than I can have here, but the performance problems they're thinking of and the ones people usually rant about on these forums are not the same ones (or same magnitude). Before being so confident it's NTFS itself that's the issue, try ReFS (and FAT32 for that matter) and tell me if you see the performance problems you've encountered actually improve a lot. And then narro…

I have been running ReFS for many years now on all but the system partition. But for reliability/self-heal reasons.

The MFT was annoying because if you create 1 mil files, and the delete them, the MFT will not be shrunk back.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#66

Post by i80and »

coldtea wrote: post #57
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3rd party supporting a file system would be one of the last things on a list of all software I’d ever want a 3rd party writing instead of the OS maker. Nightmare to evaluate the options, pure stress testing the options, difficult to know if it didn’t mess something up.

> 3rd party supporting a file system would be one of the last things on a list of all software I’d ever want a 3rd party writing instead of the OS maker. Given how many people use FUSE, Paragon NTFS for Mac, and similar tools, you're hardly totally representative.

Third party read-write NTFS drivers took FOREVER to become really robust. I remember hearing horror stories not infrequently up until maybe a decade or less ago.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#67

Post by mystifyingpoi »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #64
mystifyingpoi wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NTFS was only supported well on Windows until recently I remember using ntfs-3g without any issues on my first Linux laptop 15 years ago. So that's not really "recently".

I intentionally excluded unofficial or third party software, as almost anything is supported if you’re brave enough. The quality of said drivers also wildly varies. Until 4 years ago, nothing was good enough for the upstream Linux kernel.

I mean, yeah, you could say that. Something being in the kernel is a good benchmark of quality. But IMO open-source is different. For instance, Terraform had no stable release from 2014 till 2021, that didn't stop enterprises from using it on scale.

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#68

Post by atonse »

cortesoft wrote: post #27
atonse wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this even matter, if you can copy/mount files over a network? What are potential use cases where you'd want to support those additional file systems? External drives?

I just ran into a use case yesterday. I wanted to copy some files from either my Mac or my Windows machine onto the MicroSD card for my SteamDeck, which is ext4. I wanted to just plug in the card and copy files, but couldn’t.

Interesting, ok.

I don't even want to say "Use NTFS, doesn't everything support it?" because I'm not even sure that's the best solution for an SD card.

Maybe with their new FSKit API [1], someone can build a compatibility layer for it.

1: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fskit?language=obj...

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#69

Post by dataflow »

dist-epoch wrote: post #65
dataflow wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on my phone and this is a longer discussion than I can have here, but the performance problems they're thinking of and the ones people usually rant about on these forums are not the same ones (or same magnitude). Before being so confident it's NTFS itself that's the issue, try ReFS (and FAT32 for that matter) and tell me if you see the performance problems you've encountered actually improve a lot. And then narro…

I have been running ReFS for many years now on all but the system partition. But for reliability/self-heal reasons. The MFT was annoying because if you create 1 mil files, and the delete them, the MFT will not be shrunk back.

> I have been running ReFS for many years now on all but the system partition. But for reliability/self-heal reasons.

Have you ever benchmarked it against NTFS? With the same exact set of FS filter drivers running on both? How much does the performance differ?

Re: macOS Tahoe brings a new disk image format

#70

Post by summarity »

90s_dev wrote: post #60
wmf wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dupes are allowed after some number of hours.

It depends. I tried posting a few links I came across over the past few days, and it just showed me dups but they were from days or weeks or sometimes months ago.

Not sure why this comment is downvoted. Yes, I got redirected for a dupe earlier today for something posted 7 months ago. And even though the content substantially changed, it can’t be posted again.
Post reply on HN