Apple is at the moment readying the final release of its newest operating system update. Its latest update, MacOS 8.1, is shaping up to be a must-have update for all owners of MacOS 8. The best thing is that it will be a free update, available over the Internet from Apple's ftp servers in the system software section. Latest industry expectations of the release date are sometime around Jan. 6, 1998 (in time for the MacWorld Expo).
The most impressive feature of the new update is its new file system. The file system is the high level formatting of drives (most specifically the hard drive). This formatting is the physical distribution of the information over the surface of the disk, and more importantly, the way that the operating system keeps track of where all the information is stored and to what file it belongs. The file system that the Mac uses to store information at the moment is called HFS (stands for Hierarchical File System). It has certain limitations: one is that the upper limit of the size of the drives is soon to be reached (not yet, but with the way disk sizes are increasing, soon); also, with larger size hard drives, small files take up much more room then the actual size of the file. For example, 3 KB files take up 64 KB. This has to do with HFS splitting the drive into a certain number of subdivisions, called blocks. HFS can only handle a certain maximum number of blocks, and therefore the smallest size of a file that is possible is the size of this drive divided by the maximum number of blocks. The new file system, called HFS+, can handle a much larger number of blocks (not to mention larger hard drives), alleviating these problems (until the size of hard drives increases beyond the abilities of HFS+ again). To take advantages of these features though, you will have to reformat your hard drive in the new format, something that gives distinct advantages to people with large hard drives with lots of small files, e.g. web servers. Some people have reported getting back hundreds of megabytes of disk space after reformatting on large disks.
There are other advantages to the HFS+ file system too, but the operating system will have to be rewritten to take advantage of them. Features like an increase in file name length from 31 letters to 200 letters and multi-line file names. But we will have to wait until the "Allegro" system update, due "mid-year," before we are able to take advantage of these features.
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