There are [reports](http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2006/4/27/3777) that Chris Emura, the Filesystem Development Manager within Apple’s CoreOS organization is interested in porting Sun’s ZFS file system to OS X. This is potentially good news as there are a few of things that ZFS does that HFS+ can not:
1. Keep snapshots of the file system. Deleted a file ten days ago that you really need? Check the snapshots and restore.
2. Silent, live detection and repair of data corruption and bad blocks. This is really cool!! The auto-repair works on RAIDed volumes with error checking and reporting on single volumes. Essentially everything is checksummed and checked for corruption in the background. This may mean we will lose a lot of our work doing data rescue and drive recovery at Coretech!
3. Grow and shrink volumes automatically. Want more space? Add a drive and hey presto, more space. ZFS does not use partition tables, all storage is shared and all bandwidth available.
4. Everything is copy-on-write – no need to fsck or Disk Warrior your drive ever again.
5. Immense capacity as it’s a 128 bit file system. A terrabyte is 1000GB, a billion terrabytes is a zettabyte and ZFS can support up to 256 quadrillion zettabytes!! (A quadrillion is a 1 followed by fifteen zeroes – I just love large numbers.)
There’s a good PDF describing ZFS [here.](http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/docs/zfs_last.pdf)
If this pans out, it will be great news for Apple customers. ZFS incorporates some excellent ideas, and may fundamentally change the way people look at storage. In a way, it provides an abstraction similar to virtual memory, only for disk based storage. As such, adding storage is hardly any more difficult than adding memory. Oh yeah it’s open source too. Can it get any better than a self repairing RAID that checks for data and hardware errors constantly and can be expanded automatically??
Nerd Bliss State Reached. I only hope Apple go with this….