Apple Seeds ZFS Read/Write Developer Preview 1.1 for Leopard

[OldCorpse]

I recently aquired one of these Drobo units (for those who don't know walk yourselves to http://www.drobo.com). I have been using Drobo as my NAS (well in conjunction with my Airport Extreme Gygabit Router), for my house. I use Macs, my GF uses Vista... (its her work...), but we all use drobo to access our stuff. Our Drobo is hooked to two 500Gb SATA Drives... I am going to buy a 3rd 500G drive in Xmas, and a last one in or after February, to have a full 2Tb of storage.

Drobo works almost as ZFS... but i can only imagine how my Drobo will work with ZFS as its filesystem... its going to be sweet.

Kil

I checked it out. No thanks ... USB only????? And slower than sh|t in a freezer. Next!!!

 

[CWallace]

I checked (Drobo) out. No thanks... USB only????? And slower than sh|t in a freezer. Next!!!

You're not going to want to use externally-attached storage as primary storage, anyway, so even USB 2.0 speeds should be decent enough to stream movies, music and pictures. And within two years USB 3.0 should be making inroads and that will certainly be fast enough.

An X-Serve Media Center with ZFS will be a wonderful thing, I imagine. Tens of TB of storage all treated as a single drive.

 

[AtariAge]

You're not going to want to use externally-attached storage as primary storage, anyway, so even USB 2.0 speeds should be decent enough to stream movies, music and pictures.

USB 2.0 is "decent enough" to stream media, but slow as molasses when you want to do large copy operations (say, you want to back up those media files or want to copy a batch somewhere else). I'll gladly pay extra for a FW400 of (even better!) FW800 interface on a file storage device or system!!

..Al

 

[CWallace]

USB 2.0 is "decent enough" to stream media, but slow as molasses when you want to do large copy operations (say, you want to back up those media files or want to copy a batch somewhere else). I'll gladly pay extra for a FW400 of (even better!) FW800 interface on a file storage device or system!!

..Al

Very true, which is why I love the old "xcopy" command in Windows and like the option on Carbon Copy Cloner to only copy the files that have changed. So your first copy takes forever, but after that, it's much faster.

 

[overcast]

You're not going to want to use externally-attached storage as primary storage, anyway, so even USB 2.0 speeds should be decent enough to stream movies, music and pictures. And within two years USB 3.0 should be making inroads and that will certainly be fast enough.

An X-Serve Media Center with ZFS will be a wonderful thing, I imagine. Tens of TB of storage all treated as a single drive.

Why? SAN networks are used as primary storage all the time. And you wouldn't use tens of terabytes of storage as a "single drive". You'd have many file systems under that.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

I agree...the default should be a single pool that grows when you add new hard drives. And advanced options within Disk Utility should allow people to create new pools to act as a partition. Of course, only Mac OS X 10.5 (or 10.6) and later would be able to use ZFS so perhaps some users would prefer having at least one drive with HFS+ for earlier versions of OS X or FAT32 or NTFS.

I disagree about it being the default for a very simple reason. Other than the MacPro, no Mac out there in the current lineup can support more than 1 internal hard drive. That means the other Macs would need external drives. The problem with external drives is they're messy (take up desk space) and not terribly convenient to transport (i.e. how many laptop owners want to carry around an external drive in a separate case to take with them everywhere and use literally ALL THE TIME?)

So what would happen to a system that automatically 'grows' the pool of hard drive space when you plug in an external drive the first time you DO NOT take that hard drive with you when you go somewhere (i.e. laptop)? I think you will find your files are spread out across two drives and suddenly your system doesn't work anymore without the extra drive!

No, it's best that it does NOT default to merge pools without a user's permission so Apple doesn't get endless hate mail from angry laptop users who suddenly find themselves hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from their 2nd hard drive on a trip and have huge amounts of their data missing on their laptops because they had no idea their 2nd hard drive was made REQUIRED by a bad choice for default operation.

 

[CWallace]

Why? SAN networks are used as primary storage all the time. And you wouldn't use tens of terabytes of storage as a "single drive". You'd have many file systems under that.

Not if you wanted to use it as a Media Server data warehouse. At least not as I envision one, as I'd rather have all my media on a single volume that I could just keep adding drives to as I ran out of space.

 

[cluster2600]

testing

hello all,

I downloaded the beta package and i am testing:

sh-3.2# zpool upgrade -v
This system is currently running ZFS version 6.

The following versions are supported:

VER DESCRIPTION
--- --------------------------------------------------------
1 Initial ZFS version
2 Ditto blocks (replicated metadata)
3 Hot spares and double parity RAID-Z
4 zpool history
5 Compression using the gzip algorithm
6 bootfs pool property and OSX directory type
For more information on a particular version, including supported releases, see:

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/version/N

Where 'N' is the version number.
sh-3.2# chmod -R 777 /Volumes/piszkos/
sh-3.2# zpool history piszkos
History for 'piszkos':
2007-10-06.12:35:16 zpool create piszkos disk1s1
2007-10-06.12:37:35 zfs set compression=on piszkos

so i checked an i can tell you that version 6 cannot boot on x86 even in solaris but version 8 can be patient guys

i formated my external firewire drive in zfs and activated compression just to see what is happening i am copying some films on it about 90 GB.

the disk is now recognized as a volume tho.
if i disconnect the volume the mac tells me at the reconnection that is is an unrecognized format and offers to format it. if i try zpool online command the mac crashes. after reboot zpool tells me that there is no pool available.
this is not beta its ALPHA!!!

M.

 

[wms121]

..ZFS soap opera continues to OpenSolaris

http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=128595&#128595

..(no I am not referencing "soap code", "the opera browser" yada yada)..

..however it seems that "Intel and Transmeta" have resolved their lawsuit:

http://www.theregister.com/2007/10/25/intel_transmeta/

It would seem that the "barricades are being cleared" to higher bit addressing
Operating systems...see the TransMeta software blogs on 256-bit computing
(ULIW/VLIW):

http://www.transmeta.com/pdfs/techdocs/efficeon_tm8600_prod_brief.pdf

DAISY ULIW software for PPC variants?

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-525936.html

The Avispa chip..768 bit addressables (see p.2):

http://www.siliconhive.com/uploads/m48_siliconhive_rprnt.pdf


WW

 

[desenso]

So how does one get this installed anyways? I downloaded the developer package (free ADC membership), ran the installer, restarted, but none of the ZFS commands are working. (I have a Solaris ZFS server, i'm familiar with terminal usage)... first time I've ever tried a developer pack from Apple (didn't even know we could download them!).

I get an error:

You must be root in order to load the ZFS kext
internal error: failed to initialize ZFS library

Su won't give me root access... can anyone explain to me how one messes with developer things from apple?

 

[cohibadad]

ZFS is pretty crazy cool. I've been playing with ZFS pools and and raidz. It works well. The only difficulty I've had is destroy a pool to reformat (had to boot into Leopard disk and diskutil erase. actually I had to zero out the data otherwise the thing was like some reanimating zombie coming back to life.) There is so much potential for real RAID data security. I'd love to see an enclosure with 3-4 removable hard drives daisy chained with FW800. No need for RAID hardware, just raidz the drives. Even if Apple doesn't make zfs bootable in Leopard, implementing read/write is huge.

 

[DMann]

Zfs

ZFS is pretty crazy cool. I've been playing with ZFS pools and and raidz. It works well. The only difficulty I've had is destroy a pool to reformat (had to boot into Leopard disk and diskutil erase. actually I had to zero out the data otherwise the thing was like some reanimating zombie coming back to life.) There is so much potential for real RAID data security. I'd love to see an enclosure with 3-4 removable hard drives daisy chained with FW800. No need for RAID hardware, just raidz the drives. Even if Apple doesn't make zfs bootable in Leopard, implementing read/write is huge.

This is insanely promising, to say the very least!!!!

 

[Rocketman]

10.5.0 is for all practical purposes a public beta. 10.5.1 will be worth installing for bleeding edge users. 10.5.2 will probably be installed on shipping hardware (if 10.5.0 or 10.5.1 is, that would be "bad"), and will still require several software updates to use reasonably.

If you are a "trailing edge" user, please do yourself a favor and wait for 10.5.3.

Rocketman

To answer Cromulant I am not subject to NDA. Therefore I am free to talk at will.

I told you so.

 

[AnonMac50]

To think Apple still hasn't implemented this in OS X.