Formating new Hard Drive. What does "Case-sensitive, Journaled" mean?

I searched Disk Utility Help, but can't find any mention of "Case-sensitive". Which Volume Format option should I select?

Thanks!

PowerMac G5 dual 2.0 GHz, Mac OS X (10.4.10), 2 GB RAM

Posted on Aug 24, 2008 9:05 AM

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2 replies

Aug 24, 2008 11:22 AM in response to Aaaaaack!

OS X hard drive formats:

* Mac OS Extended or HFS+ is an improved version of Apple's Hierarchical File System from the mid-1980s.

* Mac OS Extended (Case Sensitive) is the same file system, but in this case, it treats file names that are the same but have different case as different. So the file text.txt is different from the file Text.txt and both can exist side by side. This matches the behavior of UNIX.

* Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is also HFS+, but it has an extra mechanism that avoids corruption of the file system when something bad happens, such as loss of power during a write operation.

* Mac OS Extended (Case Sensitive, Journaled) is HFS+ with a combination of case sensitivity and journaling.

* MS-DOS File System is the older FAT filesystem used with MS-DOS and Windows. Note that you can't have files of 4GB or bigger on a FAT volume.

* UNIX File System (UFS) is exactly what the name suggests. Don't use it unless you know you need to.

Hope this explains it adequately.

 Cheers, Tom 😉

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Formating new Hard Drive. What does "Case-sensitive, Journaled" mean?

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