News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

April 30, 2006

software

Could ZFS be coming to Macs to replace HFS+?

Posted Apr. 30, ’06, 4:24 PM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Software

FatBits John Siracusa dropped a short note from the zfs-discuss mailing list onto FatBits.

Here’s some exciting news!

Chris Emura, the Filesystem Development Manager within Apple’s CoreOS organization is interested in porting ZFS to OS X. For more information, please e-mail him directly at cemura at apple.com.

Speaking for the zfs team (at Sun), this is great news and we fully support the effort.

It’s got John all worked as he’s quite a fan. There is some CPU loss associated with using the new filesystem, but with that comes a file system that can heal itself, dynamically add space as you add hard drives (instead of worrying about where you put your data), and even let you back up the state of your hard drive to retrieve a file you’ve slashed to pieces or deleted.

As computers gain cores and processing power, is it worth losing some in order to maintain piece of mind? I think anybody that’s lost all their data due to hard drive corruption would agree. Then again, is HFS+ terribly prone to problems?


Leave a comment

 



Visit other IDG sites: