HFS+

Apple's Hierarchical File System Plus

HFS Plus or HFS+ is a file system developed by Apple. It replaced the Hierarchical File System (HFS) as the primary file system of Apple computers with the 1998 release of Mac OS 8.1. HFS+ continued as the primary Mac OS X file system.

HFS+ is an improved version of HFS, supporting much larger files (block addresses are 32-bit length instead of 16-bit) and using Unicode.

Major features:

  • Capacity - 8 exabytes (8 million terabytes)
  • Tree
  • Hard links
  • N-forked files
  • Journaling
  • Access control list
  • Compression
  • Logical volume encryption