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ZFS in Latest Leopard Builds
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I'd say COW is the enabling technology that makes snapshotting passable. So yeas while it is the snapshots and time machine that the user see COW is what makes it passable.
What's really happened here is that we have a huge surplus of CPU power and the problem is only getting "worse". ZFS puts theis excess of CPU to work the problem of staorage. Lots of credit to Sun for dong this
Also to be clear ZFS does the "integration" of storage devices at a different level then your traditional partition based volume manager. In ZFS it is managed at the file block level while traditional methods do it at the device block level.
No COW is a more fundamental feature and snapshotting can be (often is) implemented without such a behavior.
I was going to say the same thing. RAID is nothing new. I've had RAID 3 on my home server and RAID 0 on my desktop for years.
Umm I wonder if there is that much storage on Earth.
Oh I know. I've known what ZFS is for a long time now. But all I'm saying is that the concept of pools could be confusing for the average consumer.
I'm not saying in any way that ZFS and it's capabilities suck and that you HAVE to use it. ZFS is awesome.
The main problem for consumers IMHO is that when they start mixing their internal drives with their external USB and FireWire drives. One day they unplug their drive and boom there goes the filesystem.
All I'm saying is that ZFS needs some clear explenation. The OS should warn you if you use it and explain how it works since the concept of pools is quite different from the current filesystem concepts.
But I'm all for ZFS, let me make that clear.
There is even more
I believe that ZFS can even use network storage as part of the pool. So you could perhaps sign up for Amazon's S3 (if they had the right interface for it) and never run out of storage as your pool would just grow larger and larger as you used more space.
Basically ZFS has almost every single advanced filesystem thing you would want. I am not sure how much it differs from Reiser4 (which is still experimental), but it is near parity at least if not better.
I believe that ZFS can even use network storage as part of the pool. So you could perhaps sign up for Amazon's S3 (if they had the right interface for it) and never run out of storage as your pool would just grow larger and larger as you used more space.
Basically ZFS has almost every single advanced filesystem thing you would want. I am not sure how much it differs from Reiser4 (which is still experimental), but it is near parity at least if not better.
Almost every feature of ZFS i read here is practically a copy of the TimeMachine presentation, i hope we get it soon. I'm having some bad memories when Spotlight was named Cherlock and indexed the whole freaking system at night.
More accurately, every feature of Time Machine is (at least in the WWDC preview on HFS+) a hacky, not-as-cool/efficient attempt at implementing a small subset of end-user-visible functions that might SEEM like ZFS, but really aren't.
I'm sure Apple will make it easy enough and warn the users or even exclude some features like adding a USB drive to a internal HD pool. Less is more and advanced users will find there way in, no question about that.
Oh I know. I've known what ZFS is for a long time now. But all I'm saying is that the concept of pools could be confusing for the average consumer.
I'm not saying in any way that ZFS and it's capabilities suck and that you HAVE to use it. ZFS is awesome.
The main problem for consumers IMHO is that when they start mixing their internal drives with their external USB and FireWire drives. One day they unplug their drive and boom there goes the filesystem.
All I'm saying is that ZFS needs some clear explenation. The OS should warn you if you use it and explain how it works since the concept of pools is quite different from the current filesystem concepts.
But I'm all for ZFS, let me make that clear.
If the External storage options were to stay the same as no, I would almost call the opposite. As the "average" consumer would only have to add more drives to their system and not have to worry about where it is and how it works since the OS would just add it like RAM. This would me a great thing for the consumer.
More accurately, every feature of Time Machine is (at least in the WWDC preview on HFS+) a hacky, not-as-cool/efficient attempt at implementing a small subset of end-user-visible functions that might SEEM like ZFS, but really aren't.
Thats what i'm afraid of, it looks like were getting a HFS+ hack first and some years later the ZFS implementation. First Cherlock ... 5 years later Spotlight, first TimeMachine ... 5 years later ZFS. Its hard to believe Apple can implement this filesystem in osX and Timemachine in time for Leopard.
AWESOME. ZFS repairs disk damage even before you ever notice it!!!
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/demos/selfheal/
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/demos/selfheal/
This sounds very interesting, always good to be able to use the latest new tech.
From the Wikipedia article: "Populating 128-bit file systems would exceed the quantum limits of earth-based storage. You couldn't fill a 128-bit storage pool without boiling the oceans."
I wonder how long until we hit that limit
Why do we need to boil the oceans?
Umm I wonder if there is that much storage on Earth.
ha ha well in theory there is...
I hope Lepeord uses ZFS by default. Maybe this was one of those secret features because they weren't sure if they could do it in the alotted time. Its appearance in the preview could be a good sign.
You can do that now. It uses LVM, you can sync partitions without reboot, just use partprobe, pvcreate to make the partitions to volumes, suck them all together with vgcreate and use lvextend to make them bigger, hfsonline to make it. You can grow a drive to whatever you want.
You can also use pvmove, vgreduce, pgremove, if a drive is about to fail and you have another in sync as a mirror and bring it online.
oh, oops! with people saying things like, "there's not enough data in the world to fill a ZFS pool," I assumed that data could be infinitely compressed with no hit to performance. so anyway, how much more are files in ZFS able to be compressed than in HFS+ at the same performance level?
Agreed.
But moreover, if ZFS is the default for Leopard (that's a pretty big if, but not out of the question -- God bless "top secret" features) then I would imagine that it would automatically create a pool out of any internal drives but that external drives, by default, would not be considered part of that pool.
This is the kind of thing that Apple excels at: because the internal hard drives are inside the box, we should think of them as one -- together they are the storage space of the machine. But anything outside of the box, logically, seems as though it should be a separate part unless you specifically tell the computer otherwise. Thus, there could be a checkbox under "Get Info" or something similar to add that drive to the pool. I can't imagine that Apple would make it much more complicated than that.
So... 128 bit, eh?
Let's see here. If we had a 2^128 bit hard drive, we would be set for storage for a long time. Let's see here:
A Terabit is 2^40 bits, a Terabyte is 2^43 bytes. Sooo...
If we had one bit for every terabyte of storage, and then one bit for every terabyte of storage in that hard drive, we would still have half a terabyte left. That's twice what my computer has now, and about eight times what I'm actually using.
So, that ends up being roughly 6 * 10 ^ 26 times more data than is on my computer at the moment. Or, 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times the data on my disk, or 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits of data.
In terms of how much data is in the world, it depends. Do you mean in hard drives around the world, or how much disk space it would take to back up the Earth?
Interesting question... I'll get back to you on that, with some funky made up physics and maths.
Just thought I should put it in perspective.
Let's see here. If we had a 2^128 bit hard drive, we would be set for storage for a long time. Let's see here:
A Terabit is 2^40 bits, a Terabyte is 2^43 bytes. Sooo...
If we had one bit for every terabyte of storage, and then one bit for every terabyte of storage in that hard drive, we would still have half a terabyte left. That's twice what my computer has now, and about eight times what I'm actually using.
So, that ends up being roughly 6 * 10 ^ 26 times more data than is on my computer at the moment. Or, 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times the data on my disk, or 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits of data.
In terms of how much data is in the world, it depends. Do you mean in hard drives around the world, or how much disk space it would take to back up the Earth?
Interesting question... I'll get back to you on that, with some funky made up physics and maths.
Just thought I should put it in perspective.
Let's not get TOO excited
First of all, yes ZFS is very cool.
BUT, it isn't going to be great for a portable MacBook or an iMac. It's going to be great for an XServe or a MacPro with a lot of attached storage (read: many drives).
The power in ZFS comes in when you start to add drives in pairs. Each mirrored pair is spanned with the other mirrored pairs. This provides more fault tolerance than RAID 5 solutions and is obviously more flexible in terms of growth compaired with today's RAID-1 solutions.
Until they start putting multiple hard drives in a MacBookPro, ZFS is primarily a Workstation or Server feature.
And yes, that is still a fantastic addtion to OS X.
First of all, yes ZFS is very cool.
BUT, it isn't going to be great for a portable MacBook or an iMac. It's going to be great for an XServe or a MacPro with a lot of attached storage (read: many drives).
The power in ZFS comes in when you start to add drives in pairs. Each mirrored pair is spanned with the other mirrored pairs. This provides more fault tolerance than RAID 5 solutions and is obviously more flexible in terms of growth compaired with today's RAID-1 solutions.
Until they start putting multiple hard drives in a MacBookPro, ZFS is primarily a Workstation or Server feature.
And yes, that is still a fantastic addtion to OS X.
i think what you are getting confused with is the limits of the file system:
Fat32 can not store a file larger than 4GB of data. The max size of a disk can be up to 8 Terabytes.
NTFS is 16 Terabytes per file and 256 total size.
HFS+ is 16 Exibytes (lots more)
ZFS is practicaly infinite, that means you can format any sized drive, and store files as large as they will ever, ever get in the history of everything. there never will need to be an increase because the energy required to fill this file system up would be the same as needed to boil the oceans.
hope that answers your question, someone correct me if im wrong.