What is Digg?259 Comments
- DaffyDuck, on 06/20/2008, -4/+99"I hope apple can stick to this commitment as we all know ZFS was supposed to be the default for 10.5 Leopard."
Apple never made any commitment to bring ZFS to OS X in 10.5. That's the problem with rumors. In some people's minds they become reality. - WiseWeasel, on 06/20/2008, -5/+91Well, Z is the new X, so you know it's gotta be cool...
The most visible changes to a user would be storage pools, where a bunch of hard drives appear as a single larger volume (like a RAID array, but built into the filesystem instead of the device driver), and transparent redundancy, compression and versioning of all your storage, minimizing the risk of losing data, maximizing your storage capacity, and retrieving past states of files on your hard drive (like Time Machine, but built into the filesystem, with less overhead). - Darren07, on 06/20/2008, -5/+88It's only for OS X servers... Might take years before it gets to consumers.
For those who don't know what ZFS is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zfs - colincornaby, on 06/20/2008, -11/+79Another fine example of the *nix world and Apple co-operating.
- americaskate, on 06/20/2008, -5/+57Can someone explain ZFS in simple terms?
How can a user benefit from it? - bpapa, on 06/20/2008, -2/+39There may or may not be a link on this page to somewhere else that explains it. Look carefully... (hint - the text to click may be very big and near the top of the page)
- bobartig, on 06/20/2008, -0/+37Apparently it uses lots of block checksums so that data always knows if it is corrupt or not. With existing file systems, you write your data, then you find out the data is bad the next time you try to read it. ZFS is clever enough to figure this out and prevent it.
So by comparison to NTFS, or HFS+, your data has a much higher level of fidelity. Sounds good to me. - Takuro, on 06/21/2008, -1/+35Original question: Can somebody explain ZFS in simple terms?
The answer contained the following words:
- storage pools
- RAID array
- device driver
- transparent redundancy
- compression
- versioning
- overhead
Nice job. - Zehuti, on 06/20/2008, -0/+31Replace all the 2xx with 2^xx whoever cut and past didnt check the superscripting.
- vault, on 06/20/2008, -3/+30Apple never did, but Sun said it would be in Leopard as the default filesystem and then another Sun VP clarified and said it would be in future versions of OS X.
- curiousgrge, on 06/20/2008, -9/+35Everyone knows it is just a regular file system with a Frenchman saying it. "Zee file sztem!" All of a sudden, it's a rage.
- MavRevMatt, on 06/21/2008, -6/+32They don't really cooperate. Apple usually takes things that are opensource, changes them up a little and releases them in their own products. Of course recently they have given back but if you think Apple's in it "for the greater good" you're wrong. They're in it for the money.
Now of course, while they are in it for the money, what they make is excellent. - TheWindBlows, on 06/21/2008, -0/+23For people who don't realize that that the copy paster messed up.
Fixed Version:
* 2^64 — Number of snapshots of any file system[7]
* 2^48 — Number of entries in any individual directory[8]
* 2^64 B — Maximum size of a file system
* 2^64 B — Maximum size of a single file
* 2^64 B — Maximum size of any attribute
* 2^78 B — Maximum size of any zpool
* 2^56 — Number of attributes of a file (actually constrained to 248 for the number of files in a ZFS file system)
* 2^56 — Number of files in a directory (actually constrained to 248 for the number of files in a ZFS file system)
* 2^64 — Number of devices in any zpool
* 2^64 — Number of zpools in a system
* 2^64 — Number of file systems in a zpool"
2^48=281,474,976,710,656
2^56=72,057,594,037,927,940
2^64=18,446,744,073,709,552,000
2^78=3.022314549036573e+23
As you can guess these theoretical limits are huge. - WiZZLa, on 06/20/2008, -4/+27Snow Leopard server is a "consumer OS" ?
- exomni, on 06/20/2008, -10/+32For those who don't know much about ZFS, understand this: upgrading to ZFS will be the biggest step in a major OS in ten years.
- robdazomba, on 06/21/2008, -6/+28So why do people keep defending MS on the basis that Apple is just using someone else's work? The Mac-hating crowd used to bitch endlessly about Apple refusing to use stuff that wasn't their own and yet now the tables are turned. Apple is using the best thing available, even if it's not their own and MS is still laboring along trying to push ahead on their own proprietary filesystem. Which way do you people want it? Do you want Apple to use the best thing out there or do it themselves?
- reneu, on 08/03/2008, -0/+21ZFS easily handles added, changed and removed disks with simple commands. If you try to remove a disk that leaves you with less storage capacity than the amount of total data, then it won't allow you do to so, of course. You can see a quick flash demo for adding drives to a storage pool at the opensolaris.org web site:
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/demos/basi ...
I think you'll find that ZFS is the cat's meow when it comes to advanced 128-bit file systems. Enjoy. - irgeorge, on 06/21/2008, -0/+20Haha, I was going to say... only 248 entries in any directory!?
- VyPR, on 06/21/2008, -0/+20ZFS Good
NTFS Bad - qwertygirl, on 06/20/2008, -7/+26Why ZFS? This was the article that got me excited about it...
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1446/zfs_ten_reason ... - Chasuk, on 06/21/2008, -4/+23So, reading the article -- in which ZFS is explained in simple terms -- was too complicated?
- CCB0x45, on 06/20/2008, -1/+20They didnt make a statement on why it was removed because they didn't ever announce it was in there, Sun made a statement and retracted it, and rumors said it.
- WiseWeasel, on 06/20/2008, -1/+19Clarification: It's *announced* for Snow Leopard Server. Apple has a habit of releasing filesystems first on the server version, and then on the client shortly after, possibly requiring some knowledge of using the shell to enable it.
- sKiLLa182, on 06/21/2008, -0/+18No, it's a completely different file system. Windows Home Server still runs on NTFS. Whatever Windows Home Server does, it would do it better on a more efficient file system, such as ZFS. Microsoft was supposed to come out with a new file system when it released Vista. It was called WinFS, but it got cut out well before Vista's release. WinFS alone would have made Vista worth the purchase.
- tzarak, on 06/20/2008, -0/+17"WinFS is not a physical file system; rather, it provides schematized data modeling capabilities on top of the NTFS file system."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winfs - dremspider, on 06/21/2008, -0/+15As a solaris admin, I can tell you one of the coolest things, imo, is zfs send. On servers we can do zfs send , which will copy all the data from one disk to another, potentially larger disk. What is so cool about it? The system automatically remains running with all the apps on top, not know anything is going on. Once the data is fully copied over the admin can pull the old disk and replace it. So you would need to move the data first, but you can do it on a live running system which is what is cool.
With NAS or SAN, which is central storage where you have a large a array of disks it is really useful because then I can not only say have a system go from local disk to SAN, again without anyone really noticing, but I can move filesystems to other machines. Really slick. There is so much more to it, but I would admit the majority of uses deal with central storage so it will interesting to see if Apple can come up with some cool uses for home users. - counterplex, on 06/21/2008, -0/+15http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
- mikelieman, on 06/21/2008, -2/+16Don't let the Hippies hear about these Hash Trees...
- reneu, on 08/03/2008, -1/+15No more formatting, no more fdisk, no more slicing. Those can be confusing things that regular computer users have to deal with when their hard drive fails or crashes. ZFS allows computer makers like Sun and Apple to sell systems with much more highly available and reliable storage features than are currently available in the general consumer and enterprise market.
This is because there are two kinds of inexpensive hard disks in the world: those that have failed, and those that are about to. ZFS takes care of the uncertainties that exist when using such commodity disks in day-to-day activity. - mjfetner, on 06/20/2008, -1/+14Thanks for the link. . .now I'm really confused. "2^64 — Number of devices in any zpool" YES!
- ShyGuy91284, on 06/20/2008, -0/+13I'm running ZFS FreeBSD (and on Solaris before it was ported to FreeBSD) with 4x320 and 4x500 RAIDZ volumes in my data pool and it hasn't given me any trouble since I switched to it on Solaris like a year and a half ago. It isn't insanely fast (nor is it slow if configured properly with a reasonably modern [Athlon X2 + 2GB of RAM] system), but when I'm limited to a theoretical max of 125 MByte/sec by Gigabit from my file server, I don't need blazing speed. So far it's lived up to the hype for me on OSes other than OS X.
- mrsteveman1, on 06/21/2008, -0/+13WHS just puts files one more than one drive, ZFS does quite a bit more than that, like detecting silent disk corruption.
- gregfadein, on 06/21/2008, -1/+13Why don't you switch to software that uses a truly free license?
If the GPL weren't so heinously restrictive, it would be GPL compatible. - dragon76, on 06/21/2008, -0/+12There's nothing wrong with using Open Source for commercial use. That was like, the prime goal of Open Source in the 90's: trying to get businesses to switch to using Open Source. Apple has given back BOATLOADS of code to the community, my god they took KHTML and created a ***** mobile web platform with it for chrissakes. There's LOTS of other things Apple has contributed to: http://developer.apple.com/opensource/
- iamvahe, on 06/21/2008, -0/+11According to the article, it will first be introduced on the server version, then brought over to the desktop "consumer" versrion of Snow Leopard.
- poxonyou, on 06/21/2008, -1/+12As are most companies who develop applications for Unix. You can't run a giant company with volunteers. Of course, you can develop single applications with enough volunteers. Happens all the time, on Windows and OS X as well.
Also, if they were stealing code and misusing licenses, they'd be swamped with lawsuits. - Phil13, on 06/21/2008, -0/+11If I'm not mistaken, ZFS allows block-level file backing up which would be a major plus for Time Machine. Means you don't have to copy a whole 2GB file just because one block changed, just the changed block.
That's a big plus for every day consumers with backup drives and would be the primary benefit as well. - Wakuko, on 06/21/2008, -6/+16Start your photocopiers, Redmond!
- edlassiter, on 06/21/2008, -0/+10That's the idea. The system will be better, yet most users won't know or care about the technology behind it. All they'll know is that their computer just works.
- irgeorge, on 06/20/2008, -1/+11I hear that argument a lot, although the other day I saw an incredibly insightful comment on Slashdot from an Apple dev explaining the huge amount of work he, and Apple, did on various open source tools and the amount they've actually put back into open source software. Of course this comment is useless because I forgot to bookmark the comment. *****.
- wellyuk, on 06/20/2008, -2/+11No, Apple didn't mention it was going to be in 10.5. Sun mentioned it was going to be in 10.5.
- Ebulating, on 06/21/2008, -0/+9ZFS is the best file system around. I can't understand why it took so long for someone to apply Merckle Trees ( basically a binary tree of hashes where each node is the hash of its two child nodes) to a file system. It seems so obvious.
- y0urcl0ne, on 06/21/2008, -4/+13Breaking news... Microsoft gets owned.
...yet again. - smashingmonkey, on 06/20/2008, -0/+8"No more Disk Warrior"
So no more data rot? That'll be wonderful, but thanks to Alsoft for keeping our data fresh thus far! - diggimator, on 06/21/2008, -0/+8That's sort of true, however EiB really is short for "exbibyte," even though it's one of the stupider sounding versions that no one would actually use:
kibi
mebi
gibi
tebi
pebi
exbi
There are still no non-ambiguous names for the powers of 10 versions, unfortunately. - johnkelly84, on 06/21/2008, -0/+8"Microsoft was supposed to come out with a new file system when it released Vista. It was called WinFS, but it got cut out well before Vista's release. WinFS alone would have made Vista worth the purchase."
WinFS is not a physical file system, it is just a service that runs on top of NTFS. It was designed to make organizing and searching for data easier; it's basically a glorified relational database.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS - unmarked, on 06/21/2008, -1/+9You gotta start somewhere. Servers first, then consumer machines.
- pfig88, on 06/21/2008, -2/+10This is going to be great, and although I am a Mac fan, and most of my coding work is done for Apple hard/software, I don't appreciate all the people talking crap on Microsoft. The truth is, Microsoft is getting old. It's prime time was years ago. Apple's in its prime now, and i think we should embrace the most powerful, customizable, and overall best OS out there, becuase, who knows? Maybe the Apple of 2100 is Sun... Besides, Microsoft just can't keep up. They're winded, and Apple is still warming up.
- unmarked, on 06/20/2008, -0/+8Apple wasn't planning to add ZFS for consumers anytime soon. There were too many open issues with ZFS (like not being bootable) that made it an impossible choice from day one.
What happened is some overzealous Sun folks thought that because Apple was starting to show a real interested, that they knew what Apple was planning to do. - CarzorStelatis, on 06/21/2008, -0/+8Yeah but for home users (who never remember to back up), a filing system that reduces the chances of data loss would be a huge boon.
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