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ZFS (and Snow Leopard) to Speed up Solid State Drive Performance?
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That became false for Open Solaris in early June.
ZFS booting will be in place before Snow Leopard arrives.
http://lists.umanitoba.ca/pipermail/apple-list/2007/000292.html this is a good place to look for a ltitle bit of info.
this is a litle dated but still good http://zamwi.com/2007/01/16/why-do-geeks-have-lust-for-zfs/
Can someone give me a super simple primer on ZFS - I looked at the wiki but it's all specification orientated.
why it's such a big deal -
how much better is it ? Is HFS a bottleneck?
who own's it ( ie will Apple put something like this underneath a million macs if Sun can suddenly get bought by say MS and it gets burned) -
where is it going ?
why it's such a big deal -
how much better is it ? Is HFS a bottleneck?
who own's it ( ie will Apple put something like this underneath a million macs if Sun can suddenly get bought by say MS and it gets burned) -
where is it going ?
Why don't Adobe apps work on HFS+? It takes real work to make an app care what filesystem it's running under. HFS+ isn't really any different than HFS, it's case-sensitive HFS+ that breaks things, which is just wrong, no Unix-derived system should break that way.
From the link:
We're not going to do anything to disable ZFS on the Snow Leopard
client, however it will likely be command line only form, so
accessible and usable for your filesystem pleasure for all of you who
are more "hard core"
Sadly that doesn't really sounds like "support" to me. In fact, I would say the message leans more towards "un-supported" - but available - in the client version. I want a GUI!
Of course, the ZFS command line tools are pretty easy to use, but it would be awesome to plug in a firewire drive and be asked "Do you want to add the unformatted drive XYZ to 'MacBook HD'? "
There's parallel NFS (pNFS) where your data can live on any server "in the cloud" and whoever needs it fetches it from that host (or from a central host, if the client doesn't speak pNFS).
Also comes with OpenSolaris in the 2008/11 release, AFAIK.
Apple _really_ made a winning move when they settled for the BSD-codebase as a foundation for their future OS. Another one was of course the move to Intel.
It remains to be seen how Snow Leopard looks from a system-administration point of view, but with ZFS on board, they've at least a good headstart.
The storage sectors on an SSD can only be read and written too a certain amount of times before failure also....nothing works forever.
Currently, you can't remove a drive from a ZFS pool, at least not in Solaris 10U5 (don't know about OpenSolaris).
So, such a feature would be a sure road to disaster.
While ZFS is relatively easy, it also offers a lot of ways to shoot yourself in your feet (and head). NOT giving endusers a GUI for it is a good thing.
If you think you really desperately need it, there's always the man-pages ;-)
SUN owns it, but it's under the CDDL licens it's a Open Source licen
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/faq/licensing_faq/
Beside alot of cool server/storges featurs, then it tjek you data for error all the time, and not just when you run scandisk/chekdisk/what ever.
Then for the Time Mashine, rigth now time mashine hardlink all non change files, and get a new copy of changes files.
on ZFS you can go down in bit information.
So if you change a file it will not copy the hole file to the time mashine, but only the info about the change.
Realy nice if you have a DVD projekt that you change a little in, then will not copy the hole file again.
You can also have it as a snapshot funktion on the computer it self.
And then server side it can alot of cool stuff whit ZPools. But you don't need that as a privat person
Okay... but if you consider the friction and the heat generated by the spinning platters and the wearing out of the read/write head of traditional drives, then compare it to SSD, it has virtually no risk of mechanical failure. True that SSD have limited life cycle for writing data, but if you combine that with ZFS, you have an almost fool proof way to store and access data.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Comparison_with_hard_disk_drives
http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ssd_write_limit
Yes, but by default HFS and HFS+ aren't. You can create a case-sensitive HFS+ filesystem (new in 10.4 I think), but strangely OSX won't work right if you do.
all this convinces me that SSD's in the moment aren't used very efficiently. therefore it's probably better to hold off from buying one. the performance gains aren't that great. it's better IMHO to wait another year and then buy a much cheaper 256GB SSD for my notebook and that will then be used efficiently by the OS.
Case-sensitive HFS+ works for my team
No sure what issues you are seeing, but we all moved to case-sensitive HFS+ on our move to Leopard and it works great for us. No issues in our team.
No sure what issues you are seeing, but we all moved to case-sensitive HFS+ on our move to Leopard and it works great for us. No issues in our team.
You know what...
If what you said is true, and what I said here is also true... then the debate over whether or not Snow Leopard will be Intel-only or not is settled. Why? Sun and Apple won't bother to make ZFS boot support for PowerPC... and ZFS will be the native file system in Snow Leopard.
ZFS won't be required...
I have stated in other forums (and, no... I am not trying to hijack this one), but I do hope Apple keep up developing for PPC. So developing Snow Leopard for PPC, but not supported and certainly not optimised (AltiVec etc), and keeping, especially the server OS, open to IBM's Power series.
You know what I mean.... Marklar, but then the opposite: Ralkram... developing Mac OS X secretly on PPC
HFS+ and the Posix layer use case-insensitive Unicode. If Apple dared to use a case sensitive file system as the default, tons of applications would break, and a lynch mob would go to Cupertino.
Yep, SSDs certainly don't last forever, but with different data storage techniques and new processes, SSD manufacturers have dramatically increased the lifetime of SSDs in the last 3 years. New SSDs have incredible MTBF ratings compared to even enterprise level SAS HDDs.
Here's a snippet from a TGdaily article referring to Samsung about their new SSD line:
"It states the new 128GB SSDs will last "approximately 20 times longer than the generally accepted 4-5 year life span of a notebook PC hard drive". That's 80-100 years before it kicks."
Given the order of magnitude quicker seek time compared against 15K enterprise HDDs, SSDs should have the fastest random I/O performance. Are you confusing that metric with something else?
Also, manufacturers of SSDs have made amazing progress in the last 12 months. *Significantly cheaper* SSDs from the likes of Samsung, Intel, Micron and many lesser-known Taiwanese companies with with 100MB+ read/write rates are going to be available soon. I'm willing to bet that we'll see *fast* 128GB+ SSDs for $400 within 12-18 months.
Again, from a TGdaily article (Micron preps 256 GB SSDs for notebooks - http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38743/135/)
"Sources suggested that 128 GB and 256 GB SSDs will be in reach for enthusiasts later this year with 128 GB models falling well below the $500 mark and 256 GB versions targeting a price point around $500"
just a few links:
Micron preps 256 GB SSDs for notebooks
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38743/135/
Samsung puts 128 GB SSDs into mass-production
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38307/135/
Samsung fires up 128GB SSD massive attack
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/09/samsung_128gb_ssd_mass_production/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
Well, that isn't really true. There is indeed a lot of work to be done to maximize their performance, but they already great to have. The primary problem has not been performance, just price. High speed SSDs (over 100MB/sec sustained read/write speed) have historically been very expensive, but the prices are coming down very fast, so It's a good idea to wait another year or so for these fast SSDs to trickle down into consumer products. (Google "Intel Micron SSD").
There are some good logical reason way a file system is limited to local disks. But if you did want to use networked storage you could "mount" a remove export into the local file system.
I seriously doubt Apple wants to "fork" ZFS. That would create some serious problems years down the road.
For all of you who want to try out ZFS. You can download Solaris for free from Sun's web site. Solaris of ccourse comes with a working implementation of ZFS and Solaris will run inside a VMware Fusion VM on any modern Mac. If you don't have Fusion, get Sun's "virtual box" it's almost the same thing as Fusion but Sun is offering it for free. It runs well in mac OS X. Anyone can have a working ZFS sytem and all the documentation on a few hours if they want.