vxfs or hfs?

[Todd Martinez_1]

Dear All,

I need to know more about what considerations apply in choosing between HFS and
VxFS file systems. Can someone please point me to a white paper which
discusses the pros/cons of each? If there is someone who would be willing to
express an opinion, the detailed situation is as follows:

My primary application makes heavy use of scratch files, typically around
10Gb. These are read and written roughly ten times, usually but not always in
sequential fashion. I do not care about data integrity for these files -- it
is faster to regenerate the files if something happens to them. So which of
HFS/VxFS is fastest when data integrity is irrelevant and the files populating
the disk are large?

Thanks,
Todd

[Terja Lange_1]

The a major difference between vxfs and hfs is the ability to increase
filesystems online. VXFS you can, hfs you cannot. SO to increase your
filesystem size,
in hfs you must unmount - thus needing to stop any applications that are using
the area. The other major difference is that HFS is free and part of HPUX,
werheas vxfs licence costs. Performance wise they tend to be very similar. If
the machine crashes, a vxfs
filesystem will be a lot faster to bring back up,
where as hfs requires considerable checking.

[Nancy Hubert_1]

I just want to specify that yes you can increase the file system size without
unmount it using vxfs but to
do this you need to purchase a product called
"Advanced JFS", if you have the base vxfs
that comes with the OS you will need to unmount
it first before you do an extendfs.

If you have Advanced JFS (or Online JFS) you will
use the fsadm command.

Regards.