About file systems and formats

[Chuck Swiger]

On Mar 29, 2007, at 1:25 PM, Andrew Falanga wrote:
> Both drives are similar in capability.  They are both 7200 rpm  
> drives, etc.
> So what is so much different about NTFS from FFS?

All sorts of things.  :-)

> Are the file systems
> really that different that MS's system is simply dog slow, or is  
> the format
> for FreeBSD skipping some "integrity" checks on the surface of the  
> drive or
> whatever (this assumes that the MS install process is actually  
> doing this).

The Windows format is probably doing a bad sector scan and testing  
each and every sector during the format.  The Unix newfs/mkfs doesn't  
perform bad-sector checking, but you can invoke things like the  
smartmon utilities to perform disk checking later on.

> Please understand, I intend only to find the answer to the question  
> with
> this.  I'm looking for starting a "war" about who's file system  
> rocks more
> than the other.  The idea of an integrity check was just  
> speculation between
> my colleague and I because there such a speed difference in formatting
> things (once windows is installed) when choosing between a "Quick  
> Format" or
> a "Full Format".

A "quick format" is the Windows equivalent of what newfs does, yes.

> P.S. on a side note, but related to this, in what directories under  
> the
> system sources will I find the source code for the FFS used by  
> FreeBSD, and
> how are those modules structured?

See:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/ufs/ufs/

...versus other filesystems found here:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/fs/

-- 
-Chuck