So, ultimately, this is a hardware play, then. That makes sense, because most of the features of ZFS don't add any value to a Mac with a single internal drive and at most one or two USB drives, which is how almost all Macs are used.
So, ultimately, this is a hardware play, then. That makes sense, because most of the features of ZFS don't add any value to a Mac with a single internal drive and at most one or two USB drives, which is how almost all Macs are used.
My favorites:
* Data reliability (checksumming, etc...)
* Compression
* Lots and lots of undo
* Including undoing entire OS upgrades
* Cheap and quick partitioning
* Easy disk replacements
I've made use of all of these things this week. It happens that the disk I replaced is part of a two-disk flat pool, but old disk out, larger new disk in and zero downtime is awesome.I've played a bit with ZFS myself and really enjoyed it. It's like the sum of everything we learned about filesystems and storage and previously used to shoehorn into various historical filesystems, only this time it's a clean and simple implementation.
You could even TimeMachine-without-additional-drives... I mean, why should my snapshot system and my backup system be one? How about letting me use TimeMachine locally, and if I plug up an additional drive, TimeMachine asks me if I want to backup to it as well?
Not a game-changer exactly, but a nice-ish upgrade potentially.
The biggest upgrade would honestly just be quicker/continuous replication that doesn't drag the rest of your system down.
It also enables retail locations extra options to make users happier quicker: if a customer comes in pissed with a logic board problem that's the "third strike" for that computer, the support staff can simply ask if the customer has Time Machine backups, and send the customer away with a new-in-box computer without having to worry about moving drives around and migrating files in-store.
Apple's vertical enough that keeping Time Machine simple saves them employee hours around the world every day.
(This might still change before they release Lion, though.)
Unless something changes between now and RTM, Lion will provide that feature out of the box:
http://www.9to5mac.com/54117/time-machine-can-be-used-withou...
And that's about the only feature that a typical Mac user would benefit from with ZFS, without some kind of "prosumer" or "enterprise-y" external storage device.
Also the reliability aspect. I haven't had HFS+ go bad on my own systems, but I've seen it several times on servers. It's on about the same level as ext3fs in that arena, which is pretty bad in my book.
I get the "less is more" argument and I agree generally. ZFS is so far beyond a traditional FS though.