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ZFS (and Snow Leopard) to Speed up Solid State Drive Performance?

Friday August 8, 2008 9:12 am PDT by Arnold Kim
Infoworld reports (via MacsimumNews) that Samsung has been working with developers to boost solid state drive (SSD) performance in operating systems. Samsung announced Wednesday that it has been in talks with Microsoft to boost performance in Windows:

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.

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