HPFS386 is very old, and has not seen any maintenance or support for many years. Arca Noae has not licensed this component from IBM for distribution in Blue Lion, and would not be able to support it, in any case.
The 16-bit HPFS driver should be sufficient for anyone needing access to HPFS volumes, and this also works well for removable media, such as USB sticks.
We recommend that anyone who has needs which go beyond the limits of HPFS in terms of large volumes look to JFS. Like HPFS386, JFS supports long filenames, extended attributes, bad block relocation, direct inode-level support for ACLs (access control lists), and very large cache sizes. The maximum volume size for JFS is 2TB, vs just 64GB for HPFS386 (and 16-bit HPFS). The maximum file size is also 2TB, with a theoretical maximum number of files per directory of 4 billion.
JFS supports ‘sparse files’ (this allows, for example, large database structures to be created, but consume only the physical space required by the data actually stored in them).
JFS is a journaliing filesystem, so transactions (reads, writes, deletions, creations, moves, etc.) are logged in a (separate) “journal.” In the case of a crash, this data is used to ensure the integrity of the stored data. Generally, this leads to shorter times spent checking a JFS volume for errors than on a non-journaling filesystem, such as HPFS386 (assuming the journal itself has not been damaged and is readable).
Traditional JFS data (non-bootable) volumes support dynamic volume expansion. On-line expansion of an existing volume simply involves adding partitions to the existing volume, and the filesystem is automatically expanded.
While JFS still lacks some of HPFS386’s advanced features, such as RAID-1 fault tolerance, it is modern, maintainable, and robust; a good match for today’s larger disk drives.
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