ZFS may return to the Mac through a 3rd-party

Today we can get upwards of 3TB of hard drive space in our Macs. While 3TB may seem like a ton of space, and it is, everything we do seems to be eating up more and more hard drive space. If you don’t have a Mac Pro, this additional space comes in the form of an external USB hard drive, or even a Network Attached Storage (NAS) box like a Drobo.

The beauty of a product like Drobo is that you can swap out smaller hard drives for larger ones when the smaller ones become full. This is great for those that don’t want to deal with RAID configurations. However, there have been some complaints that a Drobo is not as fast as a traditional RAID system would be. There was going to be a way to have the Mac natively support a Drobo-like file system. It was Sun’s ZFS.

ZFS was slated to be an option within Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Server; however, during the Summer of 2009, before the launch of Snow Leopard in October, this was scrapped. Well, it may be able to make a comeback.

A startup, Ten’s Complement LLC, is looking to bring ZFS back to the Mac. This would allow a user to use ZFS as a storage repository that can dynamically add additional hard drives to a storage pool without the need to reboot.

The company has stated that their software is in limited beta, and if you are interested, you can go and sign up to be part of the beta.

I’m not sure if this will work since it’s their own version of ZFS, meaning it’s not the official Sun version, and it is definitely not supported by Apple. It’ll be interesting to see if this product takes off, and if it does, how reliable and stable it is. Any data loss could be catastrophic, so I would recommend making sure you have all of your data backed up before testing this, or if you are going to test it, do it on a machine that can be wiped and reloaded. I’ll keep an eye on this and report back with anything that may be of interest.

Article Via ZDNet

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