ZFS (was Reliable Firewire drives)

[John C. Welch]

On 02/06/2008 17:56 PM, "Dan Shoop" <shoop at iwiring.net> wrote:

> ZFS, as implemented by Sun, or the Apple build for OS X, has proven to
> be far more stable than many currently shipping filesystems for the
> same platforms. Is it 100% stable, no, but nothing is. That said ZFS
> will tell you a boatload more about what's going wrong before hand.
> We've had several cases where ZFS has alerted us to issues, and in
> many cases fixed them (including things not fixable at all in other
> FS), ebfore they've developed into problems. We've found disks not up
> to production muster by just writing to them once. I can't speak well
> enough about ZFS both on Solaris and Mac OS X.

ZFS is indeed quite nice, however, it is not the perfect magic spell its PR
is trying to make it be. Like every other bit of software written, it has
bugs, including this one:
<http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6458218> that bit Joyent in
the ass: <http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?id=19430>

As well, ZFS is still only supported as *read only* on Mac OS X, so unless
you have a lot of expertise with ZFS at all levels, running the beta R/W
implementations on Mac OS X is not recommended at all.

ZFS is on the right track, but it's not the perfect FS for all things.
(There are some things it does as a matter of course that, in its current
form, would make it a rather poor choice for a consumer - level FS.)

-- 
John C. Welch         Writer/Analyst
Bynkii.com              Mac and other opinions
jwelch at bynkii.com