Replies to post #69720 on Apple Inc (AAPL)

[Tex]

re ZFS

I dunno what it is, don't care what it is and my happiness does not depend on it.

oh, be a sport!

I once lost a bunch of pics because the drive didn't notice that it was failing, and my backup system (implemented after dotMac's backup failed to handle my storage needs) didn't gracefully handle getting over-capacity, and I didn't try removing the data from the drive early enough in the drive's heading into the sh*tter so I lost the data. ZFS would have noticed very early, because ZFS (as opposed to other filesystems like HFS+) verifies all the data on the drive regularly against checksums that are pretty solid at catching bit errors at the first instance, whether they're one-bit errors or multi-bit errors. So in my view, ZFS would have helped a lot.

Then, there's the question of volume management. I have a bunch of external hard drives, all on Firewire, and it'd be nice to be able to tell the computer to treat all the external storage as one big pool of storage with one big volume. It'd be faster, and it could have ZFS-managed tolerance for a drive's failure. In other words, my backup would have backup.

ZFS is a cool product and it solves problems we all face. The fact that you didn't think it was a soluble problem doesn't mean it can't be solved. Using old filesystem tech is like using MS-Windows: it can seem normal until something is seen working better, and the inconveniences can seem like they're unavoidable and required to be tolerated.

I remember how I used to organize music by hand before iTunes' Smart Playlists. I remember "random" play from prior-to-/dev/urandom that wasn't even marginally random-looking. Everything can be improved.

What I do what is for my Mac to boot up everytime I turn it on. So far, so good.

I had mine fail on me a couple of times like that, either due to drive failure or due to mid-plane failure on an early G5 iMac. Since the data loss associated with this failure is something I assume you want to avoid, I'll put you down as supporting ZFS in Leopard ;-)

Take care,
--Tex.