SFS and PFS
Posted: Tue Oct 19, 2021 1:32 am
I don't have any Amiga, and I'm not even a special fan of microcomputers (probably because it's not my time and I started with a PC), only when I was a teenager I played the C64 passionately, a little later I licked the Atari 800XL and that's my whole adventure with these inventions. The hacked Sony and MS consoles are much closer to me, but since I know all the broken ones so far, I decided to go back a bit in time, setting my foot on a completely new terra incognita. Speaking of which, there was nothing else to choose than the legendary Amiga (unfortunately via WinUAE, but the matter is not strictly related to the emulator, so I write in the programs section).
So my first steps are of course the basics, such as the file systems used and the possible (as it turned out) partition table. I have already figured out that OFS is a floppy relic that has been replaced by FFS. Both are official, stable and ... very limited (as I read, max 8GiB medium, max 4GiB partition, max 2GiB file size - although the last one is unlikely to matter;]). I read that alternative file systems are SFS and PFS. Can you tell me how popular both of these systems are, how many people are dropping FFS in their favor, how stable they are, and what problems may I encounter with keeping my data there? Is it even worth using them? I am currently playing with an emulator specifically configured as Amiga 1200 (CPU 68020, 8MiB RAM + 256KiB Z2 Fast; BTW: is that a good config at all?) So I can just use the space allocated from the host filesystem instead of the virtual HDD, but I would like to create an environment that in the future I could transfer to real equipment, such as a CF / SD card. Games interest me on average, more the environment and application software (I want to go back in time;]).
The other side of the coin is that I also got involved in helping (QA) with the implementation of Amiga media because I would like to have a tool that will provide me with access to the data of a real media or its image, and also enable data recovery if the Amiga software fails on this matter (from Windows or Linux via Wine). The author of IsoBuster, because this is the application we are talking about, is not convinced whether it makes sense to spend time adding support for unofficial file systems, especially since there are supposedly several variants (?) And SFS and PFS, incompatible (?) With each other. Could some Amiga veteran confirm / deny this information? It seems to me that it is worth it and that in the era of vias / controllers for flash cards, hardly anyone uses FFS, etc., invisibility miracles (because the cards are cheap and capacious).
So my first steps are of course the basics, such as the file systems used and the possible (as it turned out) partition table. I have already figured out that OFS is a floppy relic that has been replaced by FFS. Both are official, stable and ... very limited (as I read, max 8GiB medium, max 4GiB partition, max 2GiB file size - although the last one is unlikely to matter;]). I read that alternative file systems are SFS and PFS. Can you tell me how popular both of these systems are, how many people are dropping FFS in their favor, how stable they are, and what problems may I encounter with keeping my data there? Is it even worth using them? I am currently playing with an emulator specifically configured as Amiga 1200 (CPU 68020, 8MiB RAM + 256KiB Z2 Fast; BTW: is that a good config at all?) So I can just use the space allocated from the host filesystem instead of the virtual HDD, but I would like to create an environment that in the future I could transfer to real equipment, such as a CF / SD card. Games interest me on average, more the environment and application software (I want to go back in time;]).
The other side of the coin is that I also got involved in helping (QA) with the implementation of Amiga media because I would like to have a tool that will provide me with access to the data of a real media or its image, and also enable data recovery if the Amiga software fails on this matter (from Windows or Linux via Wine). The author of IsoBuster, because this is the application we are talking about, is not convinced whether it makes sense to spend time adding support for unofficial file systems, especially since there are supposedly several variants (?) And SFS and PFS, incompatible (?) With each other. Could some Amiga veteran confirm / deny this information? It seems to me that it is worth it and that in the era of vias / controllers for flash cards, hardly anyone uses FFS, etc., invisibility miracles (because the cards are cheap and capacious).