Much to the dismay of those Macheads who've started hitting size limits in Tiger's HFS+ file system (all ten of you), Apple has confirmed to InformationWeek that
Leopard will
not in fact adopt the more capacious ZFS alternative as
promised last week by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Senior director of product marketing for the Mac OS Brian Croll told IW point blank that "ZFS is not happening," contradicting Schwartz's assertion that his company's 128-bit file system would be bringing goodies like built-in data integrity and virtual storage to the iMac and friends. Meanwhile, Sun had no comment on the matter. Of course for most users creating an average Word or Photoshop document, this reversal really doesn't mean much, and may in fact be beneficial when we consider the higher processing demands made by the so-called 'Zettabyte File System." For changes in Leopard that are actually, like, real, you can check out our roundup of the new features right
here.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
angelsvairwaves1 @ Jun 12th 2007 10:09AM
Yet another pointless apple post.
Neo1744 @ Jun 12th 2007 10:15AM
New acronym....YAPAP
andy @ Jun 12th 2007 10:40AM
one of the worlds biggest computer/os makers, rumored use of the worlds most advanced (yet not yet mature enough for the mainstream) file systems is extremely relevant news, you are just to either stupid or delusional to realise it
zargon @ Jun 12th 2007 11:32AM
"most advanced (yet not yet mature enough for the mainstream) file systems"
ZFS is not going to give much, if any, advantage to average and above average users. Hell, I have created my own personal 3 TB NAS system and I have absolutely no use for ZFS.
I am also not sure if most advanced is the right wording to use. They are just taking the concept of file systems in another direction, it may be the new way file systems are handled or it may be the only file system to use it. Only time can tell and it is far too early to even say if it is most advanced or even beneficial in the realm that it was designed for, massive storage solutions.
madd_matt @ Jun 12th 2007 9:55PM
"ZFS is not going to give much, if any, advantage to average and above average users. "
ZFS has a few very good things going for it, besides the file size limitation.
First of all, it lets you spread across multiple storage devices that you can pull out at your pleasure. This makes adding additional drives a breeze, without needing to use other things like RAID or lvm to unify drives. This could simplify things for end users.
Also, ZFS supports some versioning features similar to what is found in Time Machine, so it was suspected they might be working together. Guess not.
Eric Chiu @ Jun 12th 2007 10:12AM
HAHAHA... IN YOUR FACE.
btw... if apple posts are pointless, engadget should not exist.
Jonhimslf @ Jun 12th 2007 10:14AM
It wouldn't be the first time Apple (or maybe Steve specifically) has punished companies for releasing information early.
Tom Boucher @ Jun 12th 2007 10:27AM
yeah I was wondering if they got smacked down for releasing the details.
Todd @ Jun 12th 2007 10:34AM
Yes, Mr. Schwartz jump the gun a bit, but I would speculate you will, eventually, be able to get ZFS on the XServe line.
...and you're gonna need ZFS for your "web app" server to provide all those iPhones your new AJAX application :P
Juan @ Jun 12th 2007 10:37AM
"Senior director of product marketing for the Mac OS Brian Croll told..."
The problem with Apple is their marketing department runs the company.
michael @ Jun 12th 2007 10:41AM
It's pretty amazing that when ZFS won't be in OS X Leopard, we're all ok with it.
When WinFS won't be in Vista, we were pretty darn angry.
Figures.
Ignacio @ Jun 12th 2007 10:46AM
Except it wasn't Apple who said it *would* be, but Sun.
michael @ Jun 12th 2007 10:50AM
@Ignacio:
True, but still. The Sun CEO shouldn't have blabbed about it, before Apple. It probaly made Apple angry, and who knows what.
But then again, Apple likes to 'surprise' us by maybe actually putting ZFS in Leopard, and claiming that it was going to happen. So for all we know, there might be ZFS in Leopard. It's just that Apple doesn't want to let us know that yet.
nikster @ Jun 12th 2007 10:54AM
Apple never said anything about using ZFS or about replacing HFS+ for that matter.
ZFS is open source so chances are someone somewhere might hack support for it into OS X. Maybe Sun ;)
Gene Cowan @ Jun 12th 2007 11:44AM
I seem to recall that at least one of the beta builds of the Leopard installer had the option to format in ZFS; so it is natural to assume that the new OS would include it -- of course, as we all know, things change from build to build. It's also possible that Apple yanked ZFS after the news was leaked, just to punish people!
Joel @ Jun 12th 2007 11:48AM
Someone please tell me why an everyday user can't see the benefit of "Copy-on-write design makes most disk writes sequential" or "Unlimited, instantaneous read/write snapshots"?
Rick Lyon @ Jun 12th 2007 12:16PM
I too agree that Steve has punished Sun for letting the cat out of the bag. IIRC, Steve dumped ATI in favor of Nvidia over a similar slip of tongue the week before a big show.
harpreet @ Jun 12th 2007 12:39PM
Guys is it just me or everybody on their first glance on the picture above had a question regarding this persons gender ???
Kyle @ Jun 12th 2007 1:32PM
O well.. no ZFS.. Leopard is still the best OS out there.
Alpha @ Jun 13th 2007 1:40AM
Yes, you can say that... because you have used it, right?
Adrian @ Jun 12th 2007 2:46PM
ZFS is not only about maximum storage size. It also offers functionality that can be useful to the average user.
I especially find zpools interesting. The ability to create different pools over different sized disks and different controllers, adding more space dynamically to an existing pool and included striping and redundancy really is a great feature. ZFS disk/space management compared to traditional RAID seems like quite a big deal.
sumit @ Jun 12th 2007 3:03PM
I was not interested in the updates of Leopard (seemed mostly cosmetic) till I heard that ZFS was going to be in it... and then its not. At least ill save 150 bucks for a while longer till a worthwhile release. I want hot switching between native environments damnit!
gpso @ Jun 12th 2007 3:13PM
For all interested, check out the zfs discussion threads over on the open solaris mailing lists:
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermai...ne/028733.html
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermai...ne/028730.html
I'm not going to give up ZFS on Mac OS X until the very last trumpet sounds for Leopard and even then it may come in a dot update. It's too critical for "Dekstop" users to simply ignore once they understand what they're getting out of it. PLUS, do you have any idea as to how much trouble this will save Apple in customer technical support, hard drive replacements and so forth? This will take a huge ball and chain off of Apple in that regard and its associated expenses (who knows if they've caught that vision...).
gpso @ Jun 12th 2007 3:18PM
Oh, and plus, you've got to remember things like ditto blocks for single disk users, no blind data corruption (at least you KNOW when a disk is failing and what you loose as a single disk user) or if you're using raid-z you've got instant repair and alerts and if you dig into the send function you've got an incredible backup method right in place. This is truly a dream for standard desktop users and enterprise users alike.
And don't forget the fact that you'll no longer need Disk Utility for actual structural repairs!
Florian Gngi @ Jun 12th 2007 5:30PM
Read posts at the bottom of the article! It seems that there WILL be ZFS support in 10.5!
Quote:
"As to the news, it seems that Croll mispoke a couple of times when asked about ZFS in Leopard. Despite direct questions about Sun CEO Schwartz's claims that ZFS is there, Croll flatly denied the reports to two of our reporters in a 1:1 interview.
An Apple spokesperson called us Tuesday seeking to clarify Croll's statement. Croll was apparently supposed to indicate that ZFS would be available as a limited option, but not as the default file system."