ZFS

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Has anyone had any experience with ZFS?
Fushigi, maybe? Or Gary H?

I've been reading a bit about it, and it sounds really sexy.
 

ddrueding

Fixture
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I heard that it was available in Macs now, and just did some reading as well. Looks very cool. The only issue I see is that you need a whole lot of drives to make some of the higher-end features practical.
 

Handruin

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I like this quote:

"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."[1] Later he clarified:"

I guess he hasn't met Mercutio and his pr0n collection.
 

Handruin

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Figures porting this file system to Linux is a PITA due to licensing. I'd like to try it in a VM to see how it performs. I guess I could try it with solaris, but that'll make me feel like I need a shower afterwards.
 

Handruin

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Wikipedia says:

Apple, Inc. is porting ZFS to their Mac OS X operating system, according to a post by a Sun employee on the opensolaris.org zfs-discuss mailing list, and previewed screenshots of the next version of Apple's Mac OS X.[18] As of Mac OS X 10.5 (Developer Seed 9A321), support for ZFS has been included, but lacks the ability to act as a root partition, noted above. Also, attempts to format local drives using ZFS are unsuccessful; this is a known bug.[19] On June 6th 2007, Sun's CEO Jonathan I. Schwartz announced that Apple would make ZFS "the" filesystem in OS 10.5 Leopard[20]. Marc Hamilton, VP for Solaris Marketing later wrote to clarify that, in his opinion, Apple is planning to use ZFS in future versions of Mac OS X, but not necessarily as the default filesystem for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. [21] Apple has announced that ZFS will be supported in read-only mode from the command line [22], but has also released a write capable implementation available on Apple Developer Connection site to anyone that has an account (Including free accounts).
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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I think I've mentioned this before but I moved most of my pr0n off to tape a while back. I've only got maybe 1.8TB of smut that I can directly access at the moment.

:p
 

Chewy509

Wotty wot wot.
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Gold Coast Hinterland, Australia
Has anyone had any experience with ZFS?
Fushigi, maybe? Or Gary H?

I've been reading a bit about it, and it sounds really sexy.

I've been playing with it on FreeBSD-CURRENT. Very sexy technology... But due to lack of spare drives (only have 2 drives in the volume), most of the good technology goes to waste. eg, hotswap drives, redundant data arrays, etc.

I personally see ZFS taking over from the other volume managers out there in the not too distant future, especially in larger setups with 100's of drives in the volume. (ZFS on Mac OS X Servers, ZFS on FreeBSD, ZFS on Solaris will give MS a run for their money in the data center environment).

The only problem is lack of booting support (you need a separate non-ZFS boot partition which isn't an issue in the *nix world), and your backup software needs to be updated to handle the file system. (Some versions of 'dump', et al. see the drive space usage at 100% even though less than 1% is actually used due to the way the ZFS works).
 

sechs

Storage? I am Storage!
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Not knowing the intricacies of the licenses, it just sounds as if ZFS may not be distributed with Linux.
 
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