zfs on leopard
while rumors about apple's integration of sun's open solaris zfs filesystem are still going back and forth, they somehow got me interested in what zfs would actually bring to leopard. i don't have a mac, nor do i use solaris. however, i can see that it could be an advantage for apple to be able to use one filesystem, all the way through their product line, i.e. use the same one on their mac books as well as on their servers.
while it seems clear that zfs would be a good choice for their servers, the question arises: does it make sense to use zfs on a laptop? this article answered most of my questions and it is worth a read if you know as little about filesystems as i do.
zfs seems to have obvious advantages, even for aunt annie. the gist of the article:
- offers built-in incremental backups (so called snapshots)
- survives partial disk failures (by keeping multiple copies of sensitive meta data, stored in disk locations which are unlikely to crash simultaneously)
- offers built-in compression (lzjb or gzip)
- is able to serve as a software RAID (which will become increasingly more important, the faster flash memory prices are dropping)
