HPFS and JFS

[ivan]

A friend asked me a question to which I don't have an answer and I was wondering if anyone here could help me.

Why do we use JPS formatted partitions when is anything goes wrong there is no way of recovering that partition?  With HPFS we might lose the odd file but not the whole partition.  My experience is that you had better have a full up to date backup and hope for the best with a JFS partition.

[Dave Yeo]

JFS is quite a bit faster, supports a much bigger cache, has large file support, doesn't have the 64GB partition size limit and usually chkdsk runs much faster after a crash or power failure and at the worst, the same speed as HPFS.
It also has better NLS support being Unicode underneath whereas HPFS is code page dependent and if you screw up and mix code pages, you will have problems.
I haven't lost a JFS partition yet. Had some break with the worst one where chkdsk or fsck on Linux wouldn't finish, I mounted it read-only under Linux and copied everything but one sub-directory to a different partition. The lost sub-directory wasn't important and I did know the name so could have reinstalled.
There's other times that I've needed to run fsck on Linux to recover OS/2 JFS partitions and in the case of my backup media, USB drives, it is quicker to boot to Linux, run fsck, which under Linux runs the simple log redo that runs during boot on OS/2 and takes seconds. A long chkdsk on a USB 1TB partition takes forever it seems.

[Doug Bissett]

I lost a JFS partition, when JFS was new. IBM released an updated driver, and I have never seen a problem since then. Of course, I do keep reasonably current backups, which tends to discourage major failures.

I quit using HPFS a number of years ago. HPFS eats way too much lower shared memory space, and I have lost HPFS partitions, that were not recoverable (without a backup), more than once.

Otherwise, I agree with all that Dave said.

[Andy Willis]

I have experienced some issues, mostly early on as Doug mentioned. 
We are not, however; completely without tools for recovery.
DFSEE offers quite a few options and jrescuer is also available (though not updated in quite a long time).

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Plain HPFS is no comparison to JFS.

Now toss HPFS386 into the mix and you will fare better (in fact some tests did have HPFS386 performing faster, but I think that was only the case for non-SMP systems and some network driven access), but still HPFS won't deliver the options that JFS has.

I for one got tired of having multiple HPFS 64G partitions kicking around...and when CHKDSK runs...oh man, you best come back another day...LOL, yeah, it sucked!

JFS is pretty steady here, that's with a massive 1G cache, still multiple partitions, but I used those for a nightly backup, so should anything go wrong, there is an immediate recovery option available.

[ivan]

Thanks everyone, I just passed this information on to my friend, what he will do I don't know.  I have been trying to get him to try OS/2, he is a Linux man, but he likes our desktop better than Cinnamon or any of the others they have (now I can go to bed, it has been a very long night)).  Again thanks all.