Having used ZFS on my servers for a few years, it's a bit disappointing that it's not available on my Mac OS X desktop.<p>Not necessarily because it's ZFS, which is no longer state of the art. But because I've come to consider strong cryptographic checksums, free snapshots and trivial administration of storage as a bare minimum of what's required in a filesystem.<p>While ZFS may not be completely suitable for a consumer desktop, it is available now. Plus with the hierarchical storage features, imagine how wonderful it would be to have your multi-TB disc accelerated by a few GB of flash on the motherboard.<p>It's taken ZFS a long time to get where it is in terms of features and stability. It may be over five years before Apple can produce something tried and tested enough to be their new default filesystem.
I really wish someone would come out with a BSD/MIT licensed filesystem, so anyone could use it. It wouldn't have to be the one with the most features, mainly simple and good at storing typical users' files. Currently, it seems FAT32 is the only thing out there that is able to be implemented without having to worry too much about patents, licenses etc (with some exceptions). The only issue is, FAT32 sucks! I have a Canon Rebel camera that can record videos, but they can only be up to 4GB because of crappy FAT32. It doesn't matter if I have a 32GB flash/CF card in there, they can still only be 4GB.
"It turned out his research team had about the same number of people working on their FS as Apple had working on HFS, HFS+, UFS, NFS, WebDAV, FAT, and NTFS combined. I think people don't appreciate how productive Apple is on a per-engineer basis."<p>The thing is that's not quite right. The comparison there is between the crew maintaining file system support versus the crew implementing a new fs from scratch. The Author pays lip service in saying it normally takes more than one OS release to implement a FS, but still underestimates the effort it takes to make a completely new production ready FS.<p>Yes ZFS is not the be all end all. BtrFS, distributed FS's like Hammer and Venti, as well as the occasional complaint about ZFS are exhibits A-? for that, but that doesn't mean Apple can create an FS of the same sophistication in the 18? months that they release in.
That Apple has not yet done so is unexplained.<p>My explanation is that filesystem performance on desktop and laptop systems is not that big a deal; while on larger servers like what ZFS is targeted for, filesystem performance in all facets is very important.
There is HAMMER filesystem by DragonFlyBSD team <a href="http://www.dragonflybsd.org/hammer/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dragonflybsd.org/hammer/</a><p>just take it and improve it :)
ZFS is several years old now. I'd think someone could implement a filesystem that borrows many of ZFS's best concepts and adds significant improvement. I haven't kept a very close eye on btrfs but I hope it meets this since it seems poised to take over as the new default filesystem in the next few years.