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Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: runequester on January 10, 2011, 02:04:27 AM
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So far I am quite happy with FFS, but I know a lot of people use either SFS or PFS. What are the advantages associated with the two, compared to the old FFS, and under what circumstances is it worth switching?
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So far I am quite happy with FFS, but I know a lot of people use either SFS or PFS. What are the advantages associated with the two, compared to the old FFS, and under what circumstances is it worth switching?
I use SFS, and am pretty happy with it. Think it needs 020+, though (060 here). Haven't played with PFS, though. Oh, no more waiting for a 4GB FFS partition to validate because this beast decided to crash during an HDD write. Seems alot faster, too. I remember even loading Doom2 on FFS took forever, unless I used addbuffers to allocate an obscene amount of memory to it. SFS is MUCH quicker. Also seems faster with emulation using hardfiles then on native file-systems.
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I use SFS, and am pretty happy with it. Think it needs 020+, though (060 here). Haven't played with PFS, though. Oh, no more waiting for a 4GB FFS partition to validate because this beast decided to crash during an HDD write. Seems alot faster, too. I remember even loading Doom2 on FFS took forever, unless I used addbuffers to allocate an obscene amount of memory to it. SFS is MUCH quicker. Also seems faster with emulation using hardfiles then on native file-systems.
I've never run into the validation problem, but my miggy doesn't have a ton of tweaks or expansions, so it doesn't crash very much.
The speed would be nice of course.
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Stability and speed are both better with pfs and sfs vs ffs. Personally I'd never use ffs these days, but mostly due to the disk becoming invalidated easily when using that file system, especially if the system crashes while the drive is in use. Read speeds have improved with os3.x ffs at least due to using buffers, but apparently write speeds suffered from it. Maybe set up a "test" partition and use different file systems on it, and compare speed, etc. there vs. ffs so you can see for yourself what benefits the different file systems offer?
One thing that ffs does have over the others though is better hdd tools.
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Thats a good idea. May have to mess around with that this week.
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Must say that I agree with kvasir and fishy_fiz here, and I would also like to add that both SFS and PFS can handle large harddisks with partitions over 2GB. This is somewhat possible with FFS also, but it has to be patched first and there are still some limitations.
Another thing is that SFS & PFS allows the use of long file names (up to 100 chars afair).
PS! I'm talking about the FFS version included with AmigaOS 3.1 and lower here, the version of FFS included with AmigaOS 3.5 & 3.9 do also support large harddisks, but I haven't tested this personally though.
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Im using a CF card, 4 gig total, but no partition over 2, so thats not too much of a concern.
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Im using a CF card, 4 gig total, but no partition over 2, so thats not too much of a concern.
Good point! Unless you decide to upgrade to a larger CF card that is :)
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Good point! Unless you decide to upgrade to a larger CF card that is :)
absolutely :)
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Good thread, anyone done any speed comparisons between them?
I'm in the middle of setting up a SFS partition, but the drives installed on UAE at the moment.
Are there any down sides to SFS/PFS?
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I've said it here before, but I'll never use anything other than PFS3. It's easily the fastest, booting and icon loading is an enormous improvement over FFS, and it's also (less) noticeably quicker than SFS. The direct-scsi version comes in handy as well. Though I'm not a hardcore 24/7 user, I've never had a filesystem failure in many years of use.
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PFS3 is still only available from the amiga format cover disk right?
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I wanted one partition with an 8GB CF and ventured to setup using SFS, got it setup and partitioned and it worked great, except for some applications installers use their own calculation to estimate available drive space and with my the drive values being so high, it returned negative values and wouldn't let the installer finish as it thought it was out of drive space.
I opted to setup a small FFS for my boot partition and use SFS on the other larger volume, have not had issues there. If I do, I install on my boot SYS: drive which is running FFS.
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Im using a CF card, 4 gig total, but no partition over 2, so thats not too much of a concern.
I'm going to be working on this (SFS) this weekend too, we can compare notes. My hard rive in my A1200PPC died and is not coming back.
I'm going to move to 4GB CF.
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I've said it here before, but I'll never use anything other than PFS3. It's easily the fastest, booting and icon loading is an enormous improvement over FFS, and it's also (less) noticeably quicker than SFS. The direct-scsi version comes in handy as well. Though I'm not a hardcore 24/7 user, I've never had a filesystem failure in many years of use.
Where do I get it?