10 Facts About HFS Plus

HFS Plus or HFS+ is a journaling file system developed by Apple Inc It replaced the Hierarchical File System as the primary file system of Apple computers with the 1998 release of Mac OS 8.

HFS Plus+ is one of the formats supported by the iPod digital music player.

HFS Plus uses a full 32-bit allocation mapping table rather than HFS's 16 bits, improving the use of space on large disks.

HFS Plus volumes are divided into sectors, that are usually 512 bytes in size.

HFS Plus uses a larger value to address allocation blocks than HFS, 32 bits rather than 16 bits; this means it can access 4,294,967,296 allocation blocks rather than the 65,536 allocation blocks available to HFS.

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For example, on a 1 GB disk, the allocation block size under HFS Plus is 16 KB, so even a 1-byte file would take up 16 KB of disk space.

Formerly, HFS Plus volumes were embedded inside an HFS standard file system.

HFS Plus lacks several features considered staples of modern file systems like ZFS and NTFS.

Google Summer of Code project to implement write support to journaled HFS Plus+ was accepted by the Linux Foundation in 2011 but was not completed at that time and is still a work in progress.

Progress and improvements to the HFS Plus+ driver, including some updates to journaling support, are posted on the linux-fsdevel mailing list from time to time.