ZFS to become default file system in OS X?

[Chad Leigh]

On Jun 7, 2007, at 7:13 AM, Michael Winter wrote:

>> Bring home a new drive, plug it in, and your single disk just got  
>> bigger.  That's it, done.
>
> That's all good, but raises another question. What happens when one  
> of those drives goes bad?
>
> Or, along similar lines, what happens if you're using a Firewire  
> drive in this manner and it suddenly goes missing (unplugged,  
> driver trouble...)?

Well, I would not create One Giant Disk with media I am removing, so  
my further comments will talk only about the case where a disk goes  
bad or something.

While it is possible to use ZFS on a single disk, the ideal and most  
useful way is when you have multiple disks.  You can either create a  
mirror or a raidZ or raidZ2 (kind of like a raid 5 or 6).  So if a  
disk goes missing it deals with it until you fix it.  Hopefully with  
some nifty Apple GUI.

ZFS also does block checksumming and various things to guarantee data  
integrity and fixes things that go bad automagically for you when you  
have a bad block or otherwise have on-disk corruption or transitory  
corruption or whatever.  That is why they said "no more fsck" as your  
on disk structure does not go bad due to this.

--

I will mention this again since no one has yet commented on it.  The  
Mac Pro enclosure seems to have been designed knowing ZFS would be  
coming with all the expandable in-built drive bays for internal disks...

Chad
not and expert but have been using it a little on a Solaris file  
server in testing