[geeks] back to MacOS X

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2001 at 08:22:27PM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> [ On Monday, December 17, 2001 at 17:38:03 (-0600), Shawn Wallbridge wrote: ]
> > Subject: RE: [geeks] back to MacOS X
> >
> > Actually NT can convert from FAT to NTFS at any time. I just realized one of
> > our workstations had a FAT partition and converted it to NTFS, I installed
> > Win2K a year ago.
> 
> At what cost?
> 
> I.e. if you copy a FAT filesystem to an NTFS filesystem, and then
> convert the latter into an NTFS filesystem, is anything lost (or gained :-)?
> 
> I'd be completely stunned if the result were bit-for-bit identical!

Well, obviously it isn't going to be bit by bit identical (unless NTFS was just
a new name for fat, which it isn't).  The risk is that it could screw up in the
middle and toast everything.  The other part of the cost is that you loose 
compatibility with things that read/write FAT, but can't really read NTFS well,
let alone write to it (say, Linux, BeOS, etc).

The gain is much more speed, much less compression, journaling, resource forks 
(seldom used by applications, but there none the less), potentially a unified
file system (IE, c:\winnt could be a different drive from c:\, though you are
still stuck with the c: part of the path) (I say potentially since while they
released it a long time ago, then they kinda covered it up).  Also, you gain
large files (greater than 2gigs, larger than anything likely to be a problem in
at least the next 5 years).  

In the future Microsoft says they are going to be dueing some wild things with
the NTFS file system.  In 2003, they are supposedly going to release the next
SQL Server which will have a lot more flexibility and performance for semi
unstructured data.  This is currently stuff that MS says Jet (the basis for
Access) does better, which is why Exchange is built on top of Jet instead of
the more stable SQL Server.  After that, the next version of Windows is going
to have a new version of NTFS that uses the SQL Server data store as the file
system.  The next SQL Server after that is going to mainly just be SQL as a
.NET language that queries the fs, and Exchange is also going to be built 
directly on the FS.

If anyone cares, I can try and dig up URLS supporting this when I have more 
time.  This is stuff that they have been promising since Windows 2k was first
started (and it was still named Cairo).

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd