ZFS beta now on Mac OS X Leopard

For all you bleeding-edge OS X warriors Noel Dellofano, part of the ZFS development team at Apple, has posted ZFS binaries and source code on Mac OS Forge. ZFS looks to be the first 21st century file system to make it to a high-volume desktop.

I've been a fan of ZFS since I studied and wrote about it in 2006 (see ZFS: Threat or Menace? on StorageMojo or, more recently, Apple's new kick-butt file system). Besides offering provably better data integrity, ZFS also simplifies storage management. As I said in May '06, ZFS is

. . . a complete software environment for protecting, storing and accessing data, designed for the most demanding enterprise environments. Using standard storage components: disk drives, enclosures, adapters, cables. No RAID arrays. No volume managers. No CDP. No fsck. No partitions. No volumes. Almost makes you nostalgic for the good old days, doesn’t it? Like before Novocaine.

This is a beta filesystem, folks It can hose all your data very effectively. So don't go crazy. A complete back up before you play ZFS is a minimum requirement.

Ideally you should also know your way around the Unix command line because you'll be spending some quality time there. Joining the ZFS-discuss list on opensolaris.org would be smart too. If you think a "tar ball" is black and sticky don't even think about it.

The Storage Bits take One of the major reasons I like ZFS on OS X is that it brings competition to the file system arena. And as we all know, Microsoft won't do diddly about the aging NTFS unless they have competition (see How Microsoft puts your data at risk).

Comments welcome, as always.