Apple just announced full support for Sun’s ZFS (Zettabyte File System) in the next version of Mac OS X Server, 10.6. This won’t provide me any direct benefit until it’s released for the desktop version (and not much even then), but I’m still geeked about it from a pure nerd standpoint.
Gory tech details can be found here, but basically:
– It has complete end-to-end data integrity. It always knows when a block of data is corrupt and corrects it automatically. No more Disk Doctor or checkdisk required after power failures, BSODs, etc.
– It implements high-speed RAID with full stripe writes throughout, with no controller card required.
– It does away with the concept of disk volumes (no more C: drive). All drives become a single “pool” of storage. As drives are added (or removed), the size of the pool changes on the fly.
– It can manage a maximum single file size of 16 exabytes, and a single storage pool size of up to 256 zettabytes, which is…really frickin huge:
1000 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte
1000 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
1000 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte
1000 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte