Blog . Jiboneus

Rumors going on in the Mac blogosphere that the next Mac OSX upgrade, Leopard will include a new file system called ZFS. Some French Mac site put up a screenshot. I remembered reading something about ZFS file system while I was playing around with my Gentoo installation, but I end up using Reiser4. As always, I go to Wikipedia to find out what the heck if ZFS all about :-

ZFS is a 128-bit file system, which means it can store 18 billion billion (18.4 × 1018) times more data than current 64-bit systems. The limitations of ZFS are designed to be so large that they will never be encountered in practice. Project leader Bonwick said, “Populating 128-bit file systems would exceed the quantum limits of earth-based storage. You couldn’t fill a 128-bit storage pool without boiling the oceans.”

Wow that paragraph really excite me, “boiling the oceans”? The rest of the Wikipedia article however, sort of makes my head hurts, I’m not that good when it comes to numbers and math.

The file system is developed by Sun Microsystem, the original name is Zettabyte File System. The word ‘Zettabyte’ means is a hell of a lot more then Gigabyte (GB) and it’s way, way, much more then terabyte TB, in-fact the list goes like this :-

• kilobyte (kB)
• megabyte (MB) - remember when we you to think this is a lot.
• gigabyte (GB)
• terabyte (TB)
• petabyte (PB)
• exabyte (EB)
• zettabyte (ZB)
• yottabyte (YB)

If you are wondering who came out with these names, it is actually a SI prefix, also known as a metric prefix, a name or associated symbol that precedes a unit of measure. Yes I’m a Wikipedia junkie.

Back to the file system, I’m not sure whether what this means is that we could store more files in storage that is formatted with ZFS or that we could store larger files in storage that is formated with ZFS. What I do know is that ZFS could support a ridiculous amount of disks.

The cool feature that makes ZFS very powerful, is the ability to span a file system seamlessly across several disks and allow you to add more disk dynamically to that file system. This allows for a colossal file systems. Another notable feature is the ’self healing’ capabilities of ZFS that can repair silent data corruption which occurs in mirrored volumes.

To know more about ZFS there is a demo here and here on the official ZFS community page.

Anyhow I’m pretty sure that that ZFS will play a crucial role in OSX Leopard new feature, Time Machine. May be it’s because of being able to port ZFS into Mac OSX that such features as the Time Machine is possible.

May be Apple will to use the filesystem on the OS level itself? Looking forward to OSX Leopard!

Popularity: 22% [?]