Why does this not surprise me, given Apple's legendary secrecy? Ah well, at least ZFS support will be in Leopard, for those who want to use it. I will certainly use it, just for the coolness factor.
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ZFS To Become Default File System In Leopard
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Why does this not surprise me, given Apple's legendary secrecy? Ah well, at least ZFS support will be in Leopard, for those who want to use it. I will certainly use it, just for the coolness factor.
support has been known for a long time, the difference is if it becomes bootable or not.
Maybe steve said no to zfs and Marc decided to get back at him by announcing that this wonderful new file system WOULD be used ...watching all of the techy Mac users jump for joy ...and laughing when steve says it isn't true and all of our faces get that awkward disappointed look on them
I'm guessing that it WILL be bootable, given that the Solaris team got ZFS boot support working on Solaris back on March 10.
Emphasis added
Think about what you're saying here. It sounds like re-creating your main disk, even from backups, would really, really, suck. Doesn't that imply that adding an extra 500gb disk for redundancy would be a good thing?
Or to put it another way, would restoring everything from DVD and your current backup method suck, oh, $200 worth?
Thanks for reporting this.
He changed the sentence in his Sun's New Modular Blade Servers blog page, as follows:
Old text:
"Jonathan noted that Apple will announce this week that the ZFS file system from OpenSolaris will become Apple's new default file system."
New text:"Jonathan noted that Apple is planning to use the ZFS file system from OpenSolaris in future versions of their OS."
This may be a case of closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.Workspaces
I concede my general ignorance on this subject matter, but I am trying to understand. On the OpenSolaris website, there is a paragraph which reads:
"ZFS provides unlimited constant-time snapshots and clones. A snapshot is a read-only point-in-time copy of a filesystem, while a clone is a writable copy of a snapshot. Clones provide an extremely space-efficient way to store many copies of mostly-shared data such as workspaces, software installations, and diskless clients."
I think most of the hooplah for ZFS will be for server applications and backup (ala Time Machine), but the mention of "workspaces" makes me wonder how this might affect Apple's incorporation of workspaces into Leopard, but I am not sure we are talking about the same thing here. Someone please enlighten me.
I concede my general ignorance on this subject matter, but I am trying to understand. On the OpenSolaris website, there is a paragraph which reads:
"ZFS provides unlimited constant-time snapshots and clones. A snapshot is a read-only point-in-time copy of a filesystem, while a clone is a writable copy of a snapshot. Clones provide an extremely space-efficient way to store many copies of mostly-shared data such as workspaces, software installations, and diskless clients."
I think most of the hooplah for ZFS will be for server applications and backup (ala Time Machine), but the mention of "workspaces" makes me wonder how this might affect Apple's incorporation of workspaces into Leopard, but I am not sure we are talking about the same thing here. Someone please enlighten me.
Even if I did add an extra 500 gig disk (and for me it would probably take more than that), even recreating my boot disk from THAT would really really suck. To be honest, buying extra drives just to back up material that came from DVD in the first place probably isn't worth the cost.
Ultimately this is all about having options. If you have some video projects on an external that you take from place to place, then you definitely would want to keep the portable drives separate.
But if you have 3 or 4 externals that just sit in your editing bay, there's a lot to be said for pooled storage. You can add more footage say to a project, without worrying about whether that particular disk is full. Or if you're starting a new project, you don't have to worry about which disk to put it on (in terms of available space.) Instead of having physical volumes that separate your files, you can still organize by folders- isn't that basically the same thing?
I wonder what effect (if any) this will have on scratch disks for different apps. From what I've read here, it sounds like ZFS allocates read/writes for best performance. So you don't need to specifically designate an external drive as a scratch drive (or whatever works best). ZFS is going to automatically optimize read/writes anyways to take advantage of all available throughput through the different drives.
Yeah, but most of your storage on your HD aren't the actual apps, right? Most peoples' storage is taken up by their data (and of that, multimedia chews up the most storage.)
I would be surprised if you have a 500GB boot disk that is primarily filled with application files (just guessing.) And if your boot is 500GB, why would it take a larger drive than that to back it up?
At the end of the day, you will probably have the choice what filesystem to use anyway. So if it's that difficult for you to back up and migrate your data, just stick with HFS+. None of this is being forced on you, you can stay with what you have if it's not worth the trouble to change the filesystem (especially on external volumes, which can stay the same regardless of your boot disk.)
One might then complain that they're not getting the newest features, etc. of Leopard, but sometimes changes like this are necessary to move the OS forward.
True, most of my data is on secondary drives. But it's still a pain to have to offload that data and reformat, whether it's on the boot drive or not doesn't matter that much. The point is, it sounds like that's what it will take to update to the new file system, and most people probably don't have the free drive space required to copy entire drives over.
My boss sent me to a month long Solaris class, which I am about 3/4 finished with now, so I'm loaded up with fresh ZFS knowledge. This announcement has me really excited! It could make a Mac Pro the ULTIMATE content creation workstation.
Consider this: If Apple implements ZFS to it's full potential, you could load four hard drives into a Mac Pro and configure them as a RAIDz pool. In this configuration, you get MUCH faster disk i/o. If one of your drives fails, your data remains intact. Just install a new one and let it rebuild itself.
For those of you that are concerned about keeping the OS and applications separate from your media files, simply partition the pool into a small volume for the OS and applications and a gigantic volume for your media files. You can reformat the small partition at will and reinstall the OS (or restore a backup image of your OS and applications) onto that small partition while leaving your media partition intact. This makes it easy and stress free to test software without fear of losing your digital assets.
It gets better: What happens if you manage to run out of space? Don't panic. Remove one of the drives, and install a bigger one (by the time you fill up that massive volume, a much bigger drive will be inexpensive). The system automatically syncs the new drive. After it's done, replace one of the other three. Continue this cycle until the last drive is sync'd, and you're done. No backing up to external drives or dvd's or anything like that--It just works.
I hope this isn't just a rumor.
Consider this: If Apple implements ZFS to it's full potential, you could load four hard drives into a Mac Pro and configure them as a RAIDz pool. In this configuration, you get MUCH faster disk i/o. If one of your drives fails, your data remains intact. Just install a new one and let it rebuild itself.
For those of you that are concerned about keeping the OS and applications separate from your media files, simply partition the pool into a small volume for the OS and applications and a gigantic volume for your media files. You can reformat the small partition at will and reinstall the OS (or restore a backup image of your OS and applications) onto that small partition while leaving your media partition intact. This makes it easy and stress free to test software without fear of losing your digital assets.
It gets better: What happens if you manage to run out of space? Don't panic. Remove one of the drives, and install a bigger one (by the time you fill up that massive volume, a much bigger drive will be inexpensive). The system automatically syncs the new drive. After it's done, replace one of the other three. Continue this cycle until the last drive is sync'd, and you're done. No backing up to external drives or dvd's or anything like that--It just works.
I hope this isn't just a rumor.
So can you explain this part? Is RAIDz inherently redundant, so that any data on any one disk is also replicated on the other disks? Is it really pretty low config, say even on Solaris, so you can honest-to-goodness pop a drive in and the reconstruction process is automated?
Yes, RAIDz can survive the loss of one disk.
In Solaris, the reconstruction is not automatic. That isn't a limitation of ZFS though, it's just how Solaris works. Apple could make OS X automatically reconstruct a replacement RAIDz disk if they wanted, and I'm betting that they will.
I think most people only have a single boot drive containing everything, which makes it tougher for them. (although Time Machine gives them great motivation for buying that first external!)
In your case, it might be fine to just convert say your boot drive, and then wait on the others until later. If your external drives don't need to be portable, then you might benefit from being able to pool everything in ZFS.
But sooner or later something like this has to happen. The main question will be what is the difference between running Leopard on ZFS vs. HFS+ (assuming you can stay with HFS+, or that Apple is actually even moving to ZFS for Leopard!)
The same way apples compare to oranges.
Despite its abbreviation, WinFS is not a filesystem, it's a metadata database/indexing abstraction layer that sits on top of the real filesystem.
Just been reading up on ZFS, some of the features sound very interesting though not particularly useful to me at this present moment. I wonder if ZFS will end up lasting a long time as a sort of 'standard' filesystem such as FAT?
Well, not really "revolutionary" (Vista and even Windows XP - with a few restrictions - can do it, not to mention Linux and many others), but certainly "very handy".
(This is not to say ZFS isn't fairly revolutionary in other ways - it is - but not this particular example.)
Right, but ZFS can give you a nice, RAID-equiv. filesystem that's fast without custom hardware - and that you can create on the fly. So even if you started with one disk, you could just add another disk (as in the scenario we've been talking about) and, an hour or so later, the OS would have created a full backup of absolutely everything for you, so that you could lose either disk and not notice it. Oh, and as long as you hadn't lost a disk, IO would be faster too.
That's why ZFS's dynamicness is cool. Creating a RAID mirror after the fact is often a real PITA.
Pretty much any OS with software RAID capabilities released in the last 7 - 10 years can do that...
Can OS X not ? I've never actually tried to setup software RAID in OS X.
OS X can do it, but not as simply as ZFS makes it with its storage pool concept. Software RAID has been done before with USB drives, of all things, among other types of storage, on Mac OS X.
From what little I know of ZFS (from this thread and the wikipedia page) it looks to work along the same lines as the "Drive Extender" that M$ put into their Windows Home Server product. I've been beta testing that and I really like the easily scalable storage, but the streaming features it has are of little use to me, since I don't have anything compatible with media center connect. Making iTunes work on there worked for the most part, but syncing my iPod hasn't always worked very well.
Since Apple's got something that looks to be just as easy to scale, it would be great if they released a small form factor tower with drive bays for about 4 hard drives. I could set up my iTunes and iPhoto on there, have ever-expanding storage, back up the household computers to it, and it would work so much better than the Windows solution. I'm sure it'd be a lot prettier, too.
I'm envisioning something that would look like a mini version of the Mac Pro. If Apple doesn't release it, I may just have to pick up a Mac Mini and build it myself using firewire hard drives in the case. Anybody out there work with fabricating aluminum casings?
Since Apple's got something that looks to be just as easy to scale, it would be great if they released a small form factor tower with drive bays for about 4 hard drives. I could set up my iTunes and iPhoto on there, have ever-expanding storage, back up the household computers to it, and it would work so much better than the Windows solution. I'm sure it'd be a lot prettier, too.
I'm envisioning something that would look like a mini version of the Mac Pro. If Apple doesn't release it, I may just have to pick up a Mac Mini and build it myself using firewire hard drives in the case. Anybody out there work with fabricating aluminum casings?
the way I understand it, RAID-Z is like an improved RAID5 (no need for mirrors to restore after a failure) whereas every software RAID (ie traditional raid implemented in software) i've seen/heard of has been either 0, 1, 0+1 or 1+0. So for redundancy you have N/2 usable space. But my understanding is that RAID-Z uses a simmilar parity to other distributed parity RAID models, (ie you have N-1 usable space).
I'm currently waiting to head about this @ WWDC because i want to add "massive" storage to my local setup, and RAID-Z/ZFS would be great for this (there are lots more options in hardware when you dont need hardware RAID control)