February 2, 1998
New Mac file system has nice improvements, but there's a gotcha
By Bob O'Donnell
Sometimes it's the little things that count. Take Apple, for example, and its recent
introduction of Mac OS 8.1 -- the latest version of the Macintosh operating system, which
is available for free to all 8.0 customers from Apple's Web site. This upgrade
incorporates "zillions" of bug fixes (according to CEO pro tem Steve Jobs) as
well as some nice new little features and improvements.
The most important one is a file system called Hierarchical File System Plus (HFS+),
which addresses a number of limitations that have begun to affect Mac users on the older
HFS system. One of these in particular will sound familiar to PC users: Wasted disk space
as a result of inefficient file-storage methods.
On both Macs and PCs the problem stems from the fact that no one envisioned
multigigabyte hard drives becoming a common reality for desktop computers when they
designed the file systems. In both cases, the drives have a relatively small, fixed number
of individual address spaces, so that larger drives end up with larger file spaces. In
fact, tiny files that may consist of no more than a few characters can take up as much as
32KB or 64KB on large disks. And given that a large percentage of files found on any
computer are tiny, that results in a lot of wasted space.
For users of Windows-based PCs, the answer to the problem came in the form of file
allocation table (FAT)32, which is part of Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2, also called
Windows 95, and will be incorporated into Windows 98. HFS+ offers similar benefits to the
Mac world, offering file sizes of no larger than 4KB, regardless of how big the disk is.
You see, little is good.
Unfortunately, for both Mac and PC users, neither Apple nor Microsoft offers an easy
way to convert existing drives into their new formats. Both companies suggest that you
back up your entire drive, reformat them with the new HFS+ and FAT32-aware
formatting/partitioning software they provide, and then restore your data. Ironically,
this process is the most tedious and time-consuming for the people who would benefit most
from the improvements -- people with large disks.
Thankfully, several little companies have stepped up to fill these important voids. In
the PC arena, PowerQuest's PartitionMagic
3.0 supports the ability to convert existing FAT partitions into FAT32 format and on
the Mac side, Alsoft now offers PlusMaker
to convert HFS disks into HFS+ format.
PlusMaker 1.01, which is available for purchase on the company's Web site, actually ups
the ante over Apple by converting all files into .5KB file allocation blocks (that's
clusters, in PC parlance), which saves even more space than the larger 4KB blocks Apple
chose to use. Similarly, the company's PlusMaximizer product allows you to reformat drives
with the tiny .5KB block size.
In classic Mac style, the process couldn't be any easier -- it's one click or one
selection off a drop-down menu. (Frankly, I was disappointed not to find a similar,
one-button convert in the more powerful, but more confusing PartitionMagic). Best of all,
Alsoft managed to achieve this improvement without compromising compatibility or even disk
performance in any way. Pretty impressive.
In the larger scope of things, these types of conversion utilities may not merit a
place of honor. But when it comes to practical, day-to-day improvements that we can all
enjoy, it's the little things that really are important.
Copyright 1998, by InfoWorld Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of IDG Communications,
Inc. Reprinted from InfoWorld, 155 Bovet Road, San
Mateo, CA 94402. Further reproduction is prohibited.
