Apple OS X file system far less robust than NTFS?
Discussion
I'm currently in a bit of a grump as the hard disk on my MacBook is about to die....again.....for the second time.
The only time I realise it's about to go is when OS X refuses to boot, however Windows works fine and is only affected in the later stages of hard disk failure.
It makes me wonder how reliable and robust the OS X file system is! If my NTFS system can take the damage, why can't the OS X file system!?
On a side-note, I will never purchase another Seagate drive again. Two drives that fail, one after the other in a period of six months is more than just coincidence (IMHO)....
The only time I realise it's about to go is when OS X refuses to boot, however Windows works fine and is only affected in the later stages of hard disk failure.
It makes me wonder how reliable and robust the OS X file system is! If my NTFS system can take the damage, why can't the OS X file system!?
On a side-note, I will never purchase another Seagate drive again. Two drives that fail, one after the other in a period of six months is more than just coincidence (IMHO)....
lestag said:
It is probably the quality of the drive rather than any FS issues. perhaps go to teh dark side and buy a PC?? 
The only reason I have a MacBook is to test iPhone apps. That's it. Other than this, I never use OSX as I think it's terrible and I run Windows 7 on the hardware. It runs beautifully apart from when the hard disk fails.... 
cs02rm0 said:
Erm. It's probably down to the affected parts of the disk being in important places for the OSX OS, rather than the Windows one?
It's certainly not that NTFS is a superior filesystem. What do you expect OSX to do if it needs to read from failed sectors?
Perhaps not.....but on both occasions when the HD failed, OSX was first to refuse to boot.It's certainly not that NTFS is a superior filesystem. What do you expect OSX to do if it needs to read from failed sectors?
Windows just seems to chug along and gradually die when the HD completely fails.....
cs02rm0 said:
If you bought a disk from the same manufacturer and it failed again it wouldn't surprise me if it failed in the same way. Especially if it was partitioned in a similar fashion.
????? How does this make sense. Although it wasn't formatted in the same way (the last disk was 320GB and the current failed drive is 500GB), I don't see why this would make a difference.Nevertheless my confidence in Seagate is all but gone. I'll stick with Samsung or WD from now on.
If you have your NTFS partition on the first section of the disk and it starts at the outside of the platter and these disks start failing from the inside of the platter because it's overheating, then OSX is likely to nose dive before Windows and could happen with drives of different sizes. The detail's irrelevant, the point is that I wouldn't expect either hard disk failure or NTFS/HFS file placement to be random across the disk.
It's more plausible than NTFS being able to workaround hard disk failure.
It's more plausible than NTFS being able to workaround hard disk failure.
cs02rm0 said:
If you have your NTFS partition on the first section of the disk and it starts at the outside of the platter and these disks start failing from the inside of the platter because it's overheating, then OSX is likely to nose dive before Windows and could happen with drives of different sizes. The detail's irrelevant, the point is that I wouldn't expect either hard disk failure or NTFS/HFS file placement to be random across the disk.
It's more plausible than NTFS being able to workaround hard disk failure.
Fair point....I guess we'll have to see with the new HDD..... It's more plausible than NTFS being able to workaround hard disk failure.
beanbag said:
cs02rm0 said:
If you bought a disk from the same manufacturer and it failed again it wouldn't surprise me if it failed in the same way. Especially if it was partitioned in a similar fashion.
????? How does this make sense. Although it wasn't formatted in the same way (the last disk was 320GB and the current failed drive is 500GB), I don't see why this would make a difference.Nevertheless my confidence in Seagate is all but gone. I'll stick with Samsung or WD from now on.
Alternatively flash based drives are getting cheaper now.
beanbag said:
lestag said:
It is probably the quality of the drive rather than any FS issues. perhaps go to teh dark side and buy a PC??
The only reason I have a MacBook is to test iPhone apps. That's it. Other than this, I never use OSX as I think it's terrible and I run Windows 7 on the hardware. It runs beautifully apart from when the hard disk fails.... When you install Windows on a Mac using Boot Camp, you have to use Apple-supplied hardware drivers, unless you're a bit of an elite Windows hacker and know that the OEM drivers from the manufacturers of the components Apple used in their machines (Apple hardware these days doesn't have *much* secret sauce other than EFI instead of BIOS - they're mostly reference Intel and nVidia chipset designs) will work.
Perhaps Apple's Windows driver for the nForce SATA controller isn't as good as it could be? That's the only thing I could think of that puts Apple at fault here, otherwise it's just a duff hard drive and naff all to do with either Apple, OS X, the hardware build quality, or anything else. Apple's build quality and hardware design is very good indeed, presumably otherwise you would have bought a generic PC instead of buying a Mac when you much prefer to run Windows.
If you are making a bit of money out of this machine (iPhone apps *can* be lucrative, depending on how good / lucky you are) then why not invest in a good SSD for the Macbook? Apple Macbooks and Macbook Pros respond *incredibly* well to fast SSDs - they become utter rocketship laptops. Mine is beyond fast, I've never had a machine as responsive as this before. The idea of 'waiting' for an operation to complete is becoming fairly alien (other than running multi-month attribution reports against funds using the Lehman (BarCap) Agg as a benchmark).
Seriously, Apple put really cheap, slow mechanical drives in their consumer-grade computers. The Macbook *Pro* laptops get scarcely better models - they're still slow and cheap, as they sell on capacity.
Go back a decade - Apple machines were very expensive, but that was OK because they paid for themselves in the niches they were bought for. The old OS was unstable and crashed regularly when memory got tight, so old-school Apple users generally bought lots and lots of RAM to alleviate the problem. Now we've got a proper Unix OS with a very robust journaled filesystem (and IME, it's *more* robust than NTFS, since I've never had a FS corruption on OS X, whereas I've lost three days today to an NTFS filesystem corruption that, whilst I could recover the drive, certain folders were mangled beyond repair including a bunch of files I needed), using a swapfile can handle low memory conditions. But because so many Mac users tend to buy lots of RAM, heavy swapping isn't quite as frequently seen. So Apple don't bother putting fast drives in. All that consumers are bothered about is capacity.
I've been using OS X since the beginning and doing all sorts of unrecommended stuff, and never seen a filesystem failure. So I'd say you've just got a duff hard drive. Apple have a driver in the kernel of OS X that parks the drive heads when the internal accelerometer notices untoward movement (e.g. dropping, but picking up quickly can do it too) - I'm not sure if they've written a Windows version of this, especially for Windows 7. Perhaps that's why? Apple's primary work on Boot Camp was getting XP working reliably so they could claim that the Mac is just as good at running Windows as a 'normal PC' - but Windows 7 is much more recent and perhaps Apple haven't refined their drivers yet.
Also you have to ensure that it's not Windows trying to own the entire hard drive, when OS X has to play funny buggers to partition the thing such that Windows and OS X can co-exist on the same drive, one appearing as EFI and GUID Partition Table, and the Windows boot process seeing BIOS and MFT (unless W7 can do EFI and GPT these days - haven't tried W7 yet).
beanbag said:
cs02rm0 said:
If you bought a disk from the same manufacturer and it failed again it wouldn't surprise me if it failed in the same way. Especially if it was partitioned in a similar fashion.
????? How does this make sense. Although it wasn't formatted in the same way (the last disk was 320GB and the current failed drive is 500GB), I don't see why this would make a difference.Nevertheless my confidence in Seagate is all but gone. I'll stick with Samsung or WD from now on.
I personally don't think you can say anything meaningful about OSX's FS vs NTFS based on two drive failiures on your machine, there are just too many factors at work.
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