I'm curious what you feel makes NTFS more modern than HFS+. From all the documentation I've read, they seem fairly comparable in terms of feature sets (extents, fine-grained ACLs, etc) and both seem pretty modern, but there may be 'under the hood' implementation details I'm not familiar with.
My favourite example is filesystem transactions, so that you can group sets of changes into a transaction, then roll back or commit in the future (e.g. if you overwrite a DLL at the start of an installation, but then you can't overwrite another one later, you roll back the transaction). I've been wanting this in OSes for years.
Single-instance storage - the system inspects two sets of files (e.g. installation images on a network server), and if it finds identical files, it 'consolidates' them on disk. The two files are still different (if you change one, only one changes), but as long as they're identical it conserves disk space.
User-transparent on-disk encryption
Volume shadow copy (which I knew about already)
The USN Journal tracks all changes made to anything on the disk; it's similar, in a way, to OS X's filesystem access hooks, but not quite.
Yeah, NTFS is an excellent filesystem. Unfortunately many of its features such as streams and reparse points are rarely used.
Besides, you have to compare like with like. When NTFS was introduced, most Unix systems were still on something like UFS. If you wanted a journalled filesystem back then (and weren't on IRIX), you had to pay cash for VxFS.
To the one who modded this down possibly because of the idea that NTFS is "modern" (of HFS+, BTW): list one feature of NTFS that hasn't been around in other filesystems for 5 years or more.
fragmentation prevention? OS/2's HPFS had that
long file names? Apple's DOS 3.2 had them (up to 33 chars)
journaling? ext3 had it, for both data and metadata
symlinks and hardlinks? Unixes had them since the beginning of time
multiple forks: more a bug than a feature. Macs MFS had it.
NTFS is a much more modern fs than HFS+, but that doesn't necessarily make it faster.