ZFS released for Mac OS X | Hacker News Reader

ZFS released for Mac OS X

tenscomplement.com

117 pointsmchanson23 comments

A bit more background:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/03/how-zfs-is-slowly-...

The company was founded by Don Brady, who worked on the Apple ZFS for OSX project until it was cancelled.

Sadly, their website includes only marketing-buzzword compliant "tech specs" and contains no benchmarks, and there's no support for booting from ZFS. Hopefully they'll either get their act together or someone will pony up the $20 and post benchmarks and details (assuming, of course, that's not against the license).

Even on non-boot drives, ZFS can be a real boon. I used it for a 1U appliance on a solaris machine on two disks, and it saved me the cost of a RAID card.

Right - ZFS is awesome even as a non-boot storage pool. But one of the main drawbacks of MacZFS (the open-source competitor) is that it can't be booted off of, and this product doesn't seem to offer that feature as a competitive advantage.

Presumably this product offers support for the latest zpool version and is based on a much more recent ZFS codebase (and hence should perform better as well), but because their site is so devoid of benchmarks, it's hard to tell.

Looks like Silver does mirroring, but not RAIDZ. I <3 RAIDZ. RAIDZ with snapshots helped me sleep at night.

No ZFS encryption, no boot support, and costs 20 dollars.

I have no problem with the price tag, but I really fail to see the benefits of this over MacZFS, they don't even discuss whether or not graceful degradation for HFS resource forks is implemented or not.

Sorry, no cigar.

The lead developer, Don Brady did a lot of HFS development for Apple:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aopensource....

I understand that HFS compatibility/graceful degradation of native applications was a high priority for this port.

That's not saying it's implemented, but I it's a goal.

Hmmm.... unless you pay double, or more, and wait for a while longer, only supports a single disk, and no mirroring or RAIDZ features... $20 gets you one disk, $40 gets you mirrors and 2-4 disk, and the platnum offering, with no price, gets you RAIDZ1 and 2 (single and double parity) and 2-10 disks... sorry, i think building a NAS and exporting the storage to more than just OSX is the better option... AFP, they say, is not even fully working on Lion...

I don't want to pay for a commercial product that doesn't integrate well with the OS, and that is configured by a GUI. I want ZFS to be integrated into the OS, bootable with encryption, like we were supposed to see in Snow Leopard.

Sounds like you're looking for their "Developer Edition":

http://tenscomplement.com/our-products/zevo-developer-editio...

Looks like their hosting account got suspended. Here's a Google cache link:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...

I have been looking forward to this release, but the hardware I want to use it with doesn't exist yet. I want to use a Mac Mini has a filer head, connected to a small JBOD, using the data integrity, compression, dedup, and snapshot features of ZFS.

So to the hardware manufacturers, here's what I want. Either a Thunderbolt to SAS adapter, that basically has an LSI Fusion-MPT card in it, and of course a Mac OS X version of the mpt2sas driver. Then I could connect it to any JBOD. Or, integrate the SAS HBA into a drive enclosure, directly connected with Thunderbolt. What I don't want (dear Promise) is a $2500 drive-less 6-bay enclosure with hardware RAID. I don't want hardware RAID, ZFS will do RAID better than hardware.

Is there a reason you need MacOS X as your server OS?

Plenty of other options out there which have more testing and have substantial history with ZFS. I'd seriously look into OpenIndiana or similar - I run this with much success on an HP Microserver, which has plenty of expansion possibilities with a small form factor, ECC RAM, etc.

If I was the developer, I'd see about giving away the low end version as a loss leader. As is, charging $20 = less people will test it = less stable.

I wanted to reduce the amount of constantly running computers. I still want a desktop/media center, I wanted to combine that with [ZFS] file server. I'll probably end up running FreeNAS + a desktop. The reason I don't want a FreeBSD or Illumos-based OS as a media center is because of no Netflix streaming support, and Flash performance is poor too.

I'm running ubuntu 11.10 + ZFS for Linux. Works great.

http://zfsonlinux.org/

You'd want to split your front and back ends anyway, assuming you have a large TV somewhere else in the house.

Running MythTV or similar on a ZFS-enabled box that serves as a media archive, then a media optimized ARM or x86 box on the TV would be ideal.

zfs will do all that for you, but do keep in mind, especially for dedup you need a good chunk of ram for the checksum cache and cpu power is a must or it will suck..... zfs is optimzed for big systems, and does not perform well without appropriate resources. with those resources, of course it flies.

The closest you could come is probably an Atto SAS card in a TB enclosure, although that will be expensive.

This lacks details.

The wikipedia page for ZFS claims that they implement ZFSv28 (same as FreeBSD), but I'm skeptical.

While I understand the lack of encryption (it's one of the very latest additions to ZFS anyway), I see no mention of compression, snapshots, dedup, easy raid, everything that makes ZFS so cool.

Instead, they market.. sharing ? It's a local filesystem, it should be shareable through classical means anyway...

PS: ok. On-disk format is v28, but they just didn't implemented the associated features ? That's plain weird.

PPS: Disregard what I said. Should have delved more into the website..

http://tenscomplement.com/our-products/zevo-platinum-edition

Without encryption, this is a huge step back from HFS+.

In theory you should be able to run ZFS on top of CoreStorage.

I would want that to be bootable before even considering it. Give me anything bootable that is faster than Apple's current codebase for HFS+ and I'll buy it.

If boot speed is your main concern, just use a SSD. I've upgraded a month ago and I'm still amazed at every single boot.

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