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ZFS To Become Default File System In Leopard

yg17 said:
So much like RAID0, what happens if one of the drives in the pool dies? Wouldn't all data be lost since pieces of files might be on both drives? Personally, I'd rather keep the 160GB and 500GB (which equals 660 btw ;)) separate so if one drive dies I'm not completely screwed
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That would be my concern as well. I think it's great that Apple is introducing it as well, I just hope they do what they did with UFS and make it an option, but not the default.
 
Such as?

Chaszmyr said:
Was anyone else hoping that this wouldn't be the case? ZFS is definitely an improvement over HFS+, but there are new file system advancements that aren't in ZFS, and I'd like for Apple to use something cutting edge.
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What advancements are you referring to? I haven't heard of anything imore cutting edge than ZFS.
 
In the bit of the keynote I just watched, when describing ZFS this was said : "It permits hard drive failure"...watch it...even though he's no Steve, the content is quite interesting...
 
Does anyone know if the ZFS pool can have an NFS share added to it? I have my Linux box serving several hard drives to my Mac Mini, would be great if I could make them be seen as one drive.
 
thanx for some info on ZFS. couple things though...

1. how much speed gain are we talking about here?

2. pooling sounds good but it probably is only valuable in Mac Pros only as you don't have options of adding more storage in other Macs.

3. does ZFS pool external drives as well? if yes, what happens if you boot the computer without that external drive?
 
yg17 said:
AFAIK, you can choose whether or not a device is in a pool, so you can have separate pools. The thumb drive (which is probably FAT32 making it a moot point anyways, but lets assume it's ZFS) would be its own separate "pool" consisting of it and nothing else. You could have 2 hard drives, and they can both be in the same "pool" or again, be separate "pools". Much like RAID arrays. I would assume that unless you specifically define pools, by default, each device will be independent
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That sounds very cool, and a great way to manage storage especially if one has acquired a few external hard drives over the years. It would be awesome to be able to treat them like a RAID rather than having to switch back and forth between drives. If I'm understanding the above correctly.
 
Regardless of how great the file system is, the big question for users is how easy is the upgrade? Can a disk just be switched over, or do you have to reformat?

This sounds like a big improvement, but Apple can't exactly expect people to have a second drive handy with enough free space to hold their entire boot drive.
 
im really hoping this isnt the biggest things to come from WWDC, sure ZFS is cool, but looking at the comparisons.. its more targeted at servers than home users.. the home advantages are more ease of use stuff..
 
This is great!!

It's gonna take some time for MacFans to truly understand the ZettaByte File System..

I have a fairly level 1 n00b "grasp" of it.Can't wait to see it in all it's glory.

But the ZFS isn't really a big part of the "secret features" so I'm guessing Jobs is just shaking his head instead of being ticked off.
 
this is how time machine is going to be an essential element. it wouldnt be too amazing the way they said they were doing it, but with ZFS it should be awesome
 
Time of announcement

He talks about ZFS and Apple starting around the 27 minute mark.

Just so you know.
 
what will ZFS do?

I don't know anything about file systems.

How will a ZFS file system change my Mac user experience?

boxlight
 
XIII said:
Sounds like a good thing. :)
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I dont know the ZFS file systme, however with what Ive read on wikipedia, it sounds great!

In tables with yes/no case entry, ZFS hass almost everytime a YES... sometimes a NO, however those were NOs to negative questions ; so a YES!
 
So wait, I know usually when one updates the OS on a Mac, say 10.3 to 10.4 all of your data and Apps are untouched. However if Leopard gets ZFS is this going to change, because I have to get a laptop ready for college with Tiger and all of my apps, etc and I don't want to have to redo that whole process half way through first term if I want leopard
 
milo said:
Regardless of how great the file system is, the big question for users is how easy is the upgrade? Can a disk just be switched over, or do you have to reformat?

This sounds like a big improvement, but Apple can't exactly expect people to have a second drive handy with enough free space to hold their entire boot drive.
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can't expect it, no. but everyone should have such.

A Pittarelli said:
this is how time machine is going to be an essential element. it wouldnt be too amazing the way they said they were doing it, but with ZFS it should be awesome
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i might actually use Time Machine now.
 
As uneducated as I am on this subject, it sounds like quite an improvement (from what I've read).
 
Chaszmyr said:
Was anyone else hoping that this wouldn't be the case? ZFS is definitely an improvement over HFS+, but there are new file system advancements that aren't in ZFS, and I'd like for Apple to use something cutting edge.
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But a proven Format is nice.
COmpared to other mainstream file systems and their birth date, ZFS is sparkling new. According to wikipedia, here are the dates for a few of them:

HFS: 1985
Fat16: 1987
NTSF: 1993
Fat32: 1996
HFS+: 1998 (OSX Current)
ZFS: 2004

That's new enough for me as far as incorporating a file system into an Operating system release. That's only 3 years. I'm actually surprised they would switch and/or be ABLE to switch that fast.
 
MacsRgr8 said:
I wonder if Steve is furious now...

I seem to remember an ATi incident (something with th G4 cube..?)
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He may well be but what is he to do? Sun doesn't benefit in any material way from having ZFS be part of Mac OS X. If Jobs says "Gosh darn diddly it, I told you not to tell anyone Jon", and removes ZFS from Mac OS X then Sun doesn't lose anything, but Mac users end up losing something extremely valuable.

I seriously doubt there'll be any real repercussions for Sun on this. Some annoyance will be felt in Cupertino I don't doubt, but ZFS, assuming Jonathan was right, will be in Leopard regardless. And a good thing too.
 
This is very interesting, if not a little unexpected from my point of view. Overall it's very, very good thing, but I wonder whether this will present any problems for older applications expecting HFS+?

As some may know, OS X has had the option of using UFS filesystems since pretty much the beginning, and you could even use it for your boot partition. However, that simply didn't work with many "Mac" applications that expected certain HFS+ features to be there which were not (as opposed to "Unix" applications that only needed a basic filesystem which UFS more than adequately provides). Even though Apple included some workarounds to mimic resource forks and such on non-HFS+ filesystems, it simply wasn't enough, as many applications crashed or refused to run from a UFS partition.

Heck, even using case-sensitive HFS+ is not recommended for the system drive because some apps may assume case-insensitivity and expect the files "Readme" and "README" to be the same. It's bad programming on the app developer's part, but I'm sure it's not uncommon. Macs have been case-insensitive for what, 20 years or more?

ZFS does support forks, so presumably Apple will use this feature to continue to support resource forks and other extended file attributes for legacy apps that need them, but what about case insensitivity? I don't see anything mentioned in the Wikipedia page about the ability to run in a case insensitive mode. Will Apple add such a mode, or will they drop that feature, preventing many older apps from running properly?

Personally, I'm of the opinion that case insensitivity is a good thing, as filenames really only exist for humans to keep track of them. A computer can just as easily reference files by number and has no need for the names at all. So it makes sense that the names should ignore case since case rarely conveys any substantial meaning in human language.

What's Apple going to do here? Dropping case-insensitivity would be a step backwards IMO. It will be interesting to find out the details starting next week.
 
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