[Info-vax] Anyone interested in another public access system

[Bob Eager]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:28:42 UTC, "Richard B. Gilbert" 
<rgilbert88 at comcast.net> wrote:

> What would you cite as an example of a "modern" file system?  Most Unix 
> systems won't even commit your file to disk until they get around to it. 
>   One of the nice things about VMS is that what you write to disk is 
> actually committed to disk within a few seconds.  A power failure does 
> not always require repairs to a VMS file system;

I agree with all of the above. But it does certainly affect performance.
I am willing to accept the lower performance in exchange for 
reliability.

> something that can't be 
> said for Unix.  Unix provides no means to create a contiguous file; just 
> splatter it all over the disk!.  Even <obligatory retching noises> 
> Windows has a utility to make your files and free space contiguous. 
> Unix just doesn't care.

Why does every thread have to turn into a UNIX hate-fest? It's another 
case of "system A has this and system B doesn't", which is meaningless 
because system B has stuff that system A doesn't have.

As it happens, many Unix file systems try to localise the blocks in the 
file as much as possible, so arguably defragmentation and specific 
contiguity requests are much less of an issue.

-- 
Bob Eager