What is the best amiga FILE SYSTEM nowadays?

[Ral-Clan]

Hi,

I have an A2000 which I've kept pretty much up-to-date as far as possible with the latest OS3.9 and patches.

But I am looking to get any speed boost I can on my hard drive.  I am wondering if there is a better (and up to date) file system than the latest OS3.9 FFS.

I have heard of Professional File System (PFS), which seems to be a commercial product - and I don't know if it's supported anymore.

Also I've heard of Smart File System (SFS) which is free, but I don't know how up-to-date it is?

Is there any file system out there than is better than the lastes "official" Amiga file system (and preferably free)?

Both PFS and SFS have rave reviews on the internet, but most of these rave reviews are old (before OS3.9 was released) so I don't know if they should apply any longer.

[Piru]

The reviews apply.

[Ral-Clan]

How does SFS compare to PFS?  Is one clearly superior?

[amigagr]

ral-clan wrote:
How does SFS compare to PFS?  Is one clearly superior?

i don't know about pfs but sfs is good enough and free
try the 1.254 version as the 2.x is in test stage and buggy enough. it's updated quiet every month too.

[Piru]

@ral-clan

How does SFS compare to PFS? Is one clearly superior?

I consider PFS3 better myself. I've got some 320GB on PFS3 partitions atm. However, this is just my opinion.

Both filesystems are very good, and certainly superior to FFS.

[Ral-Clan]

Okay, question:

Will an improved file system actually speed up file transfers between two drives using the same file system (i.e. SFS)?  Or do these file systems only improve seek times?

Basically I do a lot of work with big audio files and want to be able to load/save/burn them faster than I can right now.

[tonyvdb]

I just switched over to SFS on my A4000 and it seems to work just fine. I am running OS 3.5 and did not have to much trouble getting it to work with it. (remember that with the old FFS you could not use drives larger then 4 gig) I now have a 9 gig drive with 6 partitions on it that give me lots of flexability.

[HotRod]

SFS -> SFS is much faster than FFS -> FFS or SFS -> FFS.

Don't remember right now but I saved much time for copying files when I switched to SFS (also true for PFS3)...

It's free so... go for it.

[amigakit]

SFS is the most up-to-date - it is being developed by Joerg Strohmayer on OS 3.X and OS 4.0

Heres the link:

http://strohmayer.org/sfs/

It was updated on the 10th of March.

[buzz]

Piru wrote:
I consider PFS3 better myself. I've got some 320GB on PFS3 partitions atm. However, this is just my opinion.

I used PFS3 on my scsi disk on a4000 mostly fine. Then I put in a ide disk (40gb) and installed it on there. Seemed fine too, when not running enforcer. With enforcer, if I format the 40gb disk as PFS3 i got some hits and it failed. Without enforcer it seemed to work. But that was enough to make me switch. (And the device driver was either TD64 or NSD updated.. just PFS3 didn't like something)..

Running SFS ok, although some of the newest versions don't work for me.

PFS3 has an annoying thing where it has a delay before updating some information after a write, so if you edit a file in ced and save and reboot too quickly you loose your changes.

I did have pfs3 partitions go NONDOS on me a couple of times too. The pfs doctor tool was useless. I recovered data both times with some free tool on Aminet.

[Piru]

@buzz

Funny that, since I've used PFS3 in Enforcer, CyberGuard and MorphOS (which has built-in enforcer like environment) for years, and it never has hit, not even once.

I've used it with Commodore scsi.device (A1200 IDE), Phase5 blizzppc.device (BPPC SCSI-2) and MorphOS ide.device (UDMA IDE).

PFS3 has an annoying thing where it has a delay before updating some information after a write, so if you edit a file in ced and save and reboot too quickly you loose your changes.

True, but this speeds up disk writes massively. Also, the data is written to disk in a way that the disk can never become corrupt. The worst that can happen is that you just lose the last changes to the filesystem. And, if you send ACTION_FLUSH packet to the filesystem it will sync the uncommited buffer contents to disk right away (quite useful to have in reboot tool).

I did have pfs3 partitions go NONDOS on me a couple of times too. The pfs doctor tool was useless.

The few times I had problems due to trying write cache (bad idea with filesystem that depends on consistent disk write order), pfsdoctor recovered everything just fine.

Maybe I've just been lucky for the last ~10 years, but I've never had major problems (data lossage) with PFS, AFS, PFS2 or PFS3.

SFS on the other hand completely nuked after copying 20GB data on a freshly formatted partition. That was enough SFS for me.

[Dagon]

has anyone tried sfs on a winuae hardfile?