ZFS (and Snow Leopard) to Speed up Solid State Drive Performance?
The speed and way in which SSDs fetch and cache data are different than hard drives, said Michael Yang, flash marketing manager at Sun. Samsung hopes to work with Microsoft to boost SSD performance on Windows by discovering optimal packet sizes for data transfers and the best ways to read and write files, for example.
Of interest to Mac users is that Sun has already been working with Samsung to improve SSD support in their ZFS file system.Sun is adding capabilities to boost the durability and performance of SSDs on ZFS-based operating systems. For example, Sun may add defragmentation capabilities for SSDs, which organizes data in a particular order to enable quicker data access.
Apple has announced that ZFS read/write support will be in Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) server, although there has been no official word on the consumer version. Apple lists the benefits of ZFS:Snow Leopard Server adds read and write support for the high-performance, 128-bit ZFS file system, which includes advanced features such as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion, and snapshots.
Solid State Drives are a new technology that promise faster disk drive performance but are presently at premium prices. Prices, of course, are dropping quickly. Apple recently dropped the price of the MacBook Air 64GB SSD upgrade from $999 to $599. While there were some controversial claims from Tom's Hardware that SSDs actually reduced notebook battery life, a followup report indicates that this is not necessarily the case.Top Rated Comments
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You never know.
While silicon still remains much more expensive then iron, and likely will remain so for many more years, SSDs still have advantages in many applications and if ZFS can improve their performance, so much the better.
ZFS' "storage pool" concept seems to me to nicely complement Apple's digital lifestyle goals. As people add movies, pictures and music to their collections, the ability to treat it as one virtual pool regardless of where the files are actually located (different Macs or PCs on the home network, HDD enclosures, file servers, etc.) would make it easy to access that entire collection through a single portal (be it Finder, iTunes or Front Row).
While silicon still remains much more expensive then iron, and likely will remain so for many more years, SSDs still have advantages in many applications and if ZFS can improve their performance, so much the better.
Unless Apple has made some *major* changes to ZFS, it cannot utilize other computers/file servers or such, only local disks can be used in a pool. I'm almost completely positive this is the case in Solaris (which I've used for a while).
That is correct however it can use SAN disks which seems to be the case on many high end systems using ZFS. We use it today with multiple solaris boxes and 50TB of ZFS pools across them all.
The famous ultraportable Mac/iTablet any one?
Unless Apple has made some *major* changes to ZFS, it cannot utilize other computers/file servers or such, only local disks can be used in a pool. I'm almost completely positive this is the case in Solaris (which I've used for a while).
I imagine Sun isn't going to stand still on extending ZFS' capabilities. And if they decide to stop, Apple might not.
Give us some real news - Where is my Montevina MBP dammit!!!
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