ZFS Shows Up in New Leopard Build

Udo Schmitz writes "As a follow-up to rumours from May this year, World of Apple has a screenshot showing Sun's Zettabyte File System in "the most recent Build of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard". Though I still wonder: If it is not meant to replace HFS+, could there be any other reasons to support ZFS?"

Comments

Re:Just to get it out of the way...

[0racle]

Since we're nitpicking:

The letter "Z" is properly pronounced "Zee" in the USA and Iraq (after 2003)

That would correctly read "The letter "Z" is improperly pronounced "Zee" in the USA and Iraq (after 2003)"

Re:ZFS vs HFS vs NTFS?

[pesc]

I've never found plain-Jane posix permissions to be all that useful on anything other than the most basic of server environments. ...
What I'd really like to see is both that kind of functionality along with NTFS's really excellent ACL permission system implemented.

I wish you could read more about ZFS before suggesting how you could improve it by adding ACLs. It already supports them!

http://blogs.sun.com/marks/entry/zfs_acls

Re:What a moron

[iPaul]

You both miss the point of HFS+ and ZFS. In Solaris ZFS has not replaced UFS. ZFS is an elegant way to manage large amounts of storage tied together with inexpensive and simple SATA drives. If you have one disk in your Mac, ZFS probably will not be your choice. HFS+ will work very well and be very easy to manage. A file server with 3 or 4 750 GB drives however, might be cut up so that part of the storage is mirrored for safety, limited for certain uses, and spanned over drives for size. For example, 3 750's could be divided into 1 TB unmirrored storage, 250 GB mirrored, a temp area of up to 100GB and the rest (650+ GB depending on temp are usage) held in reserve. In addition ZFS does quite a bit of error checking on the data to avoid any possible corruption during reads. However, it will never replace HFS+ on an iMac for your average user.

There's a LOT more to ZFS than snapshots...

[toby]

Over past months, I've read a lot of people commenting on ZFS who have no idea what it is. What it is, is the next generation of filesystems, not a "tweak" of current fs technology. It just happens to "look like" an ordinary POSIX fs, from a distance (if you ignore the administration/pool stuff...) But inside, it's something new under the Sun, folks.

RAID experts don't grok it, because it does things RAID can't do (end-to-end).

Devotees of ext2fs, reiserfs (yay!), NTFS (LOL!), or HFS+ don't grok it, because none of those filesystems do what ZFS does.

Read about it before you write it off as old wine in a new bottle. To ask the question, "Does OS X need a new filesystem?" is a perfect example of missing the point. Once you've looked at what ZFS really brings to the table, you'll see why it's an inevitable future, sooner or later, and you'll stop looking foolish.

Some links I posted this week:

- http://www.osnews.com/story.php/16739/Screenshot-Z FS-in-Leopard - http://mac4ever.com/news/27485/zettabyte_sur_leopa rd/ (older rumour http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=14473)

For OS X people wondering why the fuss about ZFS - summaries include: - http://www.sun.com/2004-0914/feature/ - http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/zfs_ part1.scalable.html

"Why ZFS for home": - http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2006/05/why-zfs-for-hom e.html

"Here are ten reasons why you'll want to reformat all of your systems and use ZFS.": http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1446/zfs_ten_reason s_to_reformat_your_...

And some more technical explanations from Chief Engineer: - http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/zfs_end_to_end_ data - http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/smokin_mirrors