There is a whole bunch of talk about the new file system that Apple will put into its new OS release. As with anything this could be great or it could suck, it all depends on the execution.
Sun’s ZFS file system has some cool things that you can check out here. My worry about this change in the core file system for Apple is that it will require people to reformat their drives and possible lose data when they upgrade. Apple has never been one to shy away from making core changes to it’s OS even if it means short term pains for it’s users.
Check out some features:
- Pooled storage – No requirement for a volume manager when extra volumes added, the volume is simply added to a pool creating a vdev (virtual device), a collection of vdevs makes up a zpool, which in essence is the storage available to the file system.
- Snapshots – Read-only point in time of the file system
- Clones – write-able copy of a snapshot
- RAID-Z – Makes use of copy-on-write; rather than overwriting old data with new data, it writes new data to a new location and then overwrites the pointer to the old data
- Detects and then corrects data corruption
- Incredibly fast due to intelligent pre-fetching, and dynamic striping.
All I can say is that it better be worth it.
Update: Some of the news around that web is that Sun is backing down from saying ZFS will be the only file system in OSX Leopard and that it will be a long rollout over several product lines before it gets to consumers.
Apple has finally come out and said ZFS will not be in the OS at at. I guess Sun got bitch slapped once again.
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Portland, Oregon