I wrote a while ago about the utter coolness of Sun’s new filesystem, ZFS. There were rumors back then that it was being ported to OS X. I’ve been running a ZFS RAID-Z volume on my home file server since before that article and absolutely love it. Members of Apple’s Developer Connection have seen ZFS options in the latest build of Tiger suggesting that this support is near. When it comes out in prime time (and has had it’s tires adequately kicked) I’ll have no reservations about reformatting my MacBook Pro.
ZFS Appears in Recent OS X Build
December 18th, 2006 | Mac
4 comments ↓
Q:
It sounds like ZFS is pretty complex. Is this an upgrade that the average OSX user should put into effect?
ZFS is the simplest filesystem to administer that I can imagine, actually. UNIX-like systems use UFS or HFS+ (in OS X) which are quite cumbersome to work with. The administrative commands are cryptic to the uninitiated, just like FDISK in DOS. The commands in ZFS are elegant, an adjective rarely heard in reference to admin stuff. And when wrapped in an OS X installation and administration interface, I would have no reservation in telling my mom to go ahead and click the ZFS box during an install.
I imagine in some future release it will replace HSF+ as the default filesystem. Even without the bells and whistles (raidz, cloning, growing filesystems, etc.), ZFS is paranoid about protecting data under its control. For example, when power is rudely removed from a system, be it Solaris or Windows, sometimes you’ll get a CHKDSK or fsck warning about possible drive corruption when it boots. Given the way ZFS writes data, this won’t happen. So cool!
Cool. Thanks.
Here’s a great blog post describing why ZFS is great for Mac users: http://mtrr.org/blog/?p=83
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