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Snow Leopard to support ZFS |
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Written by Chris Tangora
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Friday, 13 June 2008 |
 Doing a little bit more digging into what is new in Snow Leopard I found something I'm actually excited about, ZFS. When the OS was in the Tiger days there were rumors and meetings with Sun about licensing the ZFS format for the Mac. The developer and I believe a few beta releases had ZFS support in it. Now with Snow Leopard they are changing that, the Snow Leopard will have full ZFS read/write support.
From the Apple Snow Leopard Server site :
For business-critical server deployments, Snow Leopard Server adds read
and write support for the high-performance, 128-bit ZFS file system,
which includes advanced features such as storage pooling, data
redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion, and
snapshots. Read on for more details.
ZFS is a pretty cool technology. It allows for a single formatted
drive to act as multiple drives, dynamic drive mapping just got
redefined with ZFS' pooling abilities. ZFS is a more mature form of
Time Machine also, it allows for system snapshots and easily restores
those snapshots. While it is not a guarantee that the regular OS will
run on ZFS (it should but it probably won't). It is nice to know that
you can create your data drives formated to ZFS. Apple should also
release a solid ZFS GUI as well.
One of the other BIG benefits of the ZFS format is the data corruption
and recovery. ZFS is built for storing data correctly. Built-in
checksum recovery keeps the data, even with bad info on the drives.
Learn more about ZFS at Sun's ZFS tutorial site.
While the fate of the PowerPC in Snow Leopard is up for question, your
data storage just got some good news. This probably was started in
Leopard, but didn't get the support it needed until the Server became a certified UNIX server. However it happened, this is the first REAL good
news about Snow Leopard, even if it is just for the server copies.
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