Sun Microsystems president and CEO Jonathan Schwartz, speaking at a company event, said that Sun’s ZFS file system will be “the” file system for Apple’s upcoming Leopard version of Mac OS X.
This has stirred up some debate over whether he misspoke about whether ZFS will be made into the default file system as opposed to just another “supported” file system.
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Whatever it is, it is clear that compared to the HFS+ (Hierarchical File System Plus), which is the standard file system on Mac OS X, the ZFS could offer many potential benefits. According to eWeek, some of the benefits are:
… such as “disk scrubbing” to prevent and correct latent errors on disks; a more efficient I/O engine; the ability to read and write to compressed file systems; and unlimited “snapshots” and “clones” that enable easy and quick backup and restores.
If ZFS is indeed made the default file system for the Mac OS X, the biggest challenge here really is for a seamless migration tool to upgrade from all previous versions of the OS. Admittedly, Apple has a history of supporting more options than are common used, so it should not be a problem here.
As it stands, Apple has always excelled into morphing technical features into nifty and very usable features. Would anyone take a stab at what kind of innovation could be up the horizon with the ZFS as the default file system. Join the discussion.
