ZFS to be the default file system in Leopard?

Steve is gonna be mad. You remember all those secret features that Leopard is supposed to have? And how Steve is going to wow us all with them at WWDC? Well, it looks like a little birdie, in the form of a big tech company's CEO, just let the whole world into one of those secrets. Mac Rumors points out that Jonathan Schwartz told an audience at a Sun event that the default filesystem in Leopard will be ZFS.

We've known for awhile that Leopard will support ZFS, so that wasn't too shocking. This is the first anyone has heard about ZFS being the default filesystem for Leopard though. Why is this a big deal? Well, ZFS is a filesystem that Sun built from the groundup to address modern needs at the filesystem level. ZFS is a 128bit filesystem meaning it can theoretically hold up to 16 exabytes worth of information across multiple devices (an exabyte, in case you don't know, is about 1,073,741,824 gigabytes so the ZFS can hold 17,179,869,184 GB of data though that would be many, many harddrives). Wikipedia has a full explanation of ZFS, which highlights all the cool features.

I suppose we'll all find out on Monday.