11. NTFS Predecessors - HPFS

• HPFS - High Performance File System - built for speeed!

  • Designed as a joint venture between Microsoft and IBM and included many marked improvements over FAT.

  • Improvements included

    • long filename support,

    • 512-byte allocation units (which almost completely did away with file slack),

  • The 386 version had nothing to do with CPU architecture, but rather used the name as the latest marketing buzzword meaning 'faster'.

  • It had a larger file I/O cache and some other minor improvements that resulted in a marked performance boost for the server version of OS/2.

  • But, it was released about the same time IBM and MS split and IBM had to pay royalties to MS anytime it sold HPFS386 so it was not widely used.

  • Windows support for this FS dropped with Windows 2000.

• See also
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Performance_File_System