Leopard to default to new file system - Sun CEO claims

Posted on 7 Jun 2007 at 09:52

Apple will make ZFS the default hard disk file system in Leopard, according to the chief executive of Sun Microsystems.

ZFS is already supported in Leopard developer builds, but until now there has been no evidence that Apple planned for it to usurp HFS+ as the default method for storing and organising data on Mac hard drives. But during a ZFS demonstration in Washington, Sun boss Jonathan Schwartz appeared to get the jump on any announcement that Steve Jobs, his opposite number at Apple, may be preparing to make to developers next week.

'In fact, this week [sic] you'll see that Apple is announcing at their Worldwide Developer Conference that ZFS has become the file system in Mac OS 10,' Schwartz said.

Marc Hamilton, Sun's VP for Solaris Marketing, later made the same claim in his blog, noting that Sun will benefit: 'every Apple developer will know ZFS and how to use it on products like our SunFire x4500 storage server and other Sun products.'

ZFS was developed by Sn for its Solaris operating system, before being made freely available under an open source licence.

Its principle advantage is that as a 128-bit system it is capable of handling much greater volumes of data than a 32-bit system such as HFS+. Also a ZFS volume need not be restricted to a single disk drive. ZFS employs virtual storage 'pools' known as zpools that can span a single or multiple devices, or vdevs (virtual devices). In other words a single volume in the OS X Finder could in fact be a pool of several internal, external and/or networked drives. The implications for the amount of storage capacity that could be available are obvious.

Other advantages include more robust copying and saving, because blocks containing active data are never overwritten, and the ability to take snapshots of the current disk structure. ZFS also provides administrator-level controls over block sizes where tasks do not perform as well with large blocks.

Author: Simon Aughton