The World of Apple has reported that the latest build of Apple’s next generation Operating System, “Leopard” will include support for Sun Microsystem’s ZFS filesystem. The ZFS filesystem has been described by Sun as “The last word in filesystems.” It appears that HFS+’s days are numbered, but on that same note, ZFS looks like an excellent alternative. Read on for what to expect from ZFS.

Overall ZFS offers the following key advantages:-

• Pooled storage - No requirement for a volume manager when extra volumes added, the volume is simply added to a pool creating a vdev (virtual device), a collection of vdevs makes up a zpool, which in essence is the storage available to the file system.
• Snapshots - Read-only point in time of the file system
• Clones - write-able copy of a snapshot
• RAID-Z - Makes use of copy-on-write; rather than overwriting old data with new data, it writes new data to a new location and then overwrites the pointer to the old data
• Detects and then corrects data corruption
• Incredibly fast due to intelligent pre-fetching, and dynamic striping.

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