How many of y’all got around to installing Snow Leopard yesterday? I meant to, but then I bought a new hard drive for my old iMac (hey, any discreet graphics card is better than this old MacBook’s Intel bologna), so I’ll be upgrading everything next week. As if any of you care, I know, but trust me: there’s a point. If you did install Snow Leopard, you’ll no doubt have noticed this glaring kick in the teeth: Apple has removed ZFS! This will go down as one of the greatest injustices ever brought upon mankind.
I kid, of course, but it’s still worth noting. Nowhere in Snow Leopard will you find the option to format a hard drive using the ZFS filesystem. If 2 percent of you have even heard of ZFS I’ll be surprised; if 1 percent of you will even miss it I’ll be double-surprised.
It’s a shame, too, since ZFS is fairly handy. So I hear, at least. Says ZDNet:
ZFS combines a file system and a volume manager, along with some cool architectural features, to create an easily managed and highly reliable file system. Advanced features that just work.
Italics mean business, friends.
ZDNet even highlighted two features that would absolutely be useful to the average user: checksumming every single file (so you can better spot data corruption) and easy-to-use snapshotting. That is, “Hey, everything works 100 percent perfectly today. Let me take a snapshot, then if something goes wrong later, I can just go back to that snapshot.”
ZFS isn’t even in Snow Leopard Server Edition, so consider it dead and buried. Of course, it’ll be a cold down in somewhere before Apple says why…
So, while watching Juventus v. Roma, be sure to pour one out for ZFS.
Do you really need an explanation? ZFS is a Sun Microsystems product. Oracle bought Sun, ZFS disappears from Snow Leopard. Cool as ZFS is, it’s now on shaky ground.
IIRC, ZFS was shaky in snow leopard to begin with… it was one of the features, then it was only in the server, then …. nothing.
I’ve actually been using the open source release of ZFS on Leopard for the past year (which isn’t fully integrated into the Finder, Dik Util, etc. but has full read and write capabilities). I have it set up as a 6 TB RAID-Z array to store high def video. It was dead simple to set up and has been rock solid. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like Apple has updated the open source release of ZFS for Snow Leopard. I think it may have to do with the pending NetApp patent lawsuit against Sun over technologies in ZFS.
I have a feeling it’ll come back.
Despite the whole OpenCL thing, and the Grand Central thing (which is good, no doubt), SL may be one to skip in this sense. (hence the $29).
What is it 32 bit, 64 bit, or what?
Look at OpenSolaris using it as default, FreeBSD 8 is there or almost there using it as default.
Unless something awful happens, I’d look for it to be coming back at some point. It’s certainly easier than writing your own filesystem.
I have a strong feeling it will be back at some point, maybe once OS X is solidly in 64-bit territory.