“Can you think of another technology from 1985 that is still central to your Mac? Me neither,” Robin Harris writes for ZDNet. “But HFS, the Mac/iOS file system, dates from 1985 – the early years of the Mac – and was lightly updated to become HFS+ in 1998, three years before Mac OS X debuted. HFS+ gave us 32 bit block addresses, longer file names and Unicode, but the underlying architecture remains 1985.”
“That’s why the biggest disappointment of this year’s WWDC is that no new file system was announced,” Harris writes. “Apple knows they have a problem: they announced ZFS on Mac Server back in 2007 before licensing issues and a lawsuit caused them to decommit.”
“The problem is that with users commonly storing millions of files, the bit rot inherent in storage – remember, the Universe hates your data – goes uncorrected and undetected,” Harris writes. “Until you try to access the file and you can’t.”
Read more in the full article here.