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The folks over at tech-recipies.com have posted 10 reasons to reformat your drives to ZFS. Makes for some very interesting reading.

 

Of course, we now pretty much know ZFS will be a part of Leopard, and I for one am excited!

Sounds good for business or servers but I don't ever use raid5 and I would like to see read/write speeds for zfs before I would think of using it. If it does check sums and repairs corruption while working, that has to come at a price.

my hackintosh has a 100gb boot disk and a mirrored RAID array for protected storage. ZFS would be a total boon for me.

 

ymmv of course, but you cant deny (after reading that list) its an impressive piece of tech.

I've been using ZFS on my Sun Blade 2000 for the last 6 months. My setup is 2 146Gb internal disks mirrored using Disksuite, and 12 SCSI disks in a D1000 JBOD container attached via a high-speed SCSI interface. While the technical details of ZFS are impressive, what has really impressed me is using this software on a daily basis. I have my home directory mounted on a ZFS volume, and run a fairly large MySQL instance on a ZFS volume. In 6 months I've not had a single bit go bad on either Volume - even though I do a great deal of development & db maintenance.

 

Of all the features that ZFS has, the best are the SysAdmin tools. Setting up and maintaining ZFS volumes is dead simple, and the fs speed is phenominal.

 

Now, having said that, there is one issues (which I know is being worked on now for the next release) and that is that boot disks cannot be mirrored under ZFS. Once that is fixed, I suspect that ZFS will be THE filesystem of choice in the Solaris worlds, the Linux world, and the Apple world.

 

A great site to check out is http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/.

cool - nice to hear a positive real-world experience.

 

joe75: HFS is about 21 years old, and replaced the original Mac FileSystem (MFS). HFS+ is only about 6 years old, iirc.

 

for the moment, it sounds like ZFS wont be usable as a boot disk fs, but i still want it for my RAID mirror. not sure how it'll work with Time Machine / Leopard. i could just about imagine having a tiny boot partition as HFS+ and a main partition for apps and data on a ZFS partition, on my macbook pro.

 

roll on MWSF!

for the moment, it sounds like ZFS wont be usable as a boot disk fs, but i still want it for my RAID mirror. not sure how it'll work with Time Machine / Leopard. i could just about imagine having a tiny boot partition as HFS+ and a main partition for apps and data on a ZFS partition, on my macbook pro.

 

As a user of ZFS I can bet that ZFS will constitute the bulk of Timemachine. The snapshot feature of ZFS, with appropriate Apple wrapping, is, in essence Timemachine. It's very simple to (VERY quickly) make snapshots of a ZFS Volume:

 

# zfs snapshot -r tank/home@now

# zfs list -t snapshot

NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT

tank/home@now 0 - 29.5K -

tank/home/ahrens@now 0 - 2.15M -

tank/home/anne@now 0 - 1.89M -

tank/home/bob@now 0 - 1.89M -

tank/home/cindys@now 0 - 2.15M -

 

From the moment the snapshot is made to completion is mere seconds - perfect for a Timemachine sortof app.

 

BTW, I found a really interesting blog entry on Sun's site that led to this little nugget:

 

http://loop.worldofapple.com/archives/2006...ac-os-x-leopard

I hope to God ZFS is used as a boot partition... I could find plenty of good uses for it on my personal Mac.

Crompression, easy partition modification, easy to backup and raid disks, fast removal, takes care of itself...

It's very Mac-like, by nature.

 

-Urby

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