Apple file systems

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Apple Filesystems

MFS The Macintosh Filesystem (MFS) was used by the earliest Macintoshes. It’s almost never used on anything but 400KB floppy disks, which are extremely rare today. Linux does not include MFS support.

HFS The Hierarchical Filesystem (HFS) was the replacement for MFS. Used on 800KB and larger floppy disks and all Macintosh hard disks until 1998, HFS is quite common in the Macintosh world.

HFS+ The follow-on to HFS borrows many features from Unix-style filesystems, but it stops short of adding a journal. New Macintoshes invariably ship with their disks formatted for HFS+, but this filesystem is not used much on removable media.

FFS MacOS X provides the option to use the Unix Fast Filesystem (FFS), which is described in the next section. Many MacOS X systems continue to use HFS+, though.