ZFS (was Reliable Firewire drives)

[Dan Shoop]

On Feb 6, 2008, at 7:19 PM, John C. Welch wrote:

> 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>

It would be fair to note when mentioning this that they were running  
an out of date version of their OS and that had they updated like they  
should have they'd never have been bitten by their problem. Also this  
bug was from 2006 and was fixed long ago so while yes, ZFS, like  
anything -- including HFS -- can have bugs, this one was squashed in  
short order. All pointing out the above proves is that you need to  
keep up with your updates, which is true for any software you use.

> 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.

To be fair the beta r/w *is* the production ZFS codebase, so the only  
thing really beta about it is that it's running or has been ported on  
OS X.

-dhan

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Shoop
Computer Scientist
iWiring / U.S. Technical Services

shoop at iwiring.net
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