14 DAY TRIAL // When reports of ZFS in Leopard first surfaced, everyone got very excited, and rightfully so, but after Apple announced that there will only be read support, much of the excitement died down. Now, a new developer update gives you hope for the revolutionary filesystem in Leopard.
The rudimentary read-only support for Sun Microsystems' ZFS filesystem isn?t much to write home about. After all, only a small fraction of Mac users even know what a file system is, let alone what is special about ZFS, so the chances of ever coming across such partitions are small. But write support is not entirely out of the picture yet, as according to AppleInsider Apple has given developers a "ZFS on Mac OS X Preview 1.1".
While normally the Leopard ZFS support will not allow ZFS pools or filesystems to be modified, developers receiving the preview are granted full access to both read and write. While it is still early, developers feel that this is a clear sign that Apple?s plans for the future include ZFS as Leopard matures. It is a common conception that ZFS is one of the main candidates for eventually replacing the current HFS+ as the default filesystem for Mac OS X, a claim already made by Sun's chief executive Jonathan Schwartz back in June.
While ZFS as the default option might not come around until whatever comes after Leopard, those interested in the filesystem will undoubtedly make the switch as soon as Apple officially ads write support, something that should not take too long considering the current preview. Unlike the previous file system update from HFS to HFS+, ZFS is a fundamentally different approach to data management, aiming to provide simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity and immense scalability. In the documentation provided with the "ZFS on Mac OS X Preview 1.1" Apple states that it alone is responsible for the posting of the ZFS filesystem to Mac OS X.