greenbytes logoEarlier this week, we reported that the ZEVO solution for bringing the ZFS file system to the Mac had been acquired by storage appliance company GreenBytes. With ZEVO having been pulled from sale with the transition, the future of ZFS on the Mac has been in question, although GreenBytes indicated at the time that it was still committed to the project.

GreenBytes has now announced that it will be launching a free "Community Edition" of ZEVO on September 15.

We wanted to take a few days to nail down the specifics, but we are happy to announce that beginning on September 15, 2012, GreenBytes will offer the ZEVO Community Edition as a freely downloadable binary!

As we approach the September 15th launch date, we will reveal more details about the functionality in the ZEVO Community Edition -- and you should expect enhancements from the prior commercial version!

Support for the new Community Edition will be handled through discussion forums, with forum members and GreenBytes staff helping users of the free edition there.

Don Brady, the former Apple engineer who worked on ZFS at the company before leaving to develop the project on his own after Apple canceled it, will be providing more information on GreenBytes' plans for ZEVO in upcoming posts on the company's blog.

Top Rated Comments

Glassed Silver Avatar
166 months ago
Give me native ZFS for Pete's sake!

I feel horrible when I check my disk for errors and it "fixes" something to broken files. (I know it doesn't damage them, bitrot does, but the file size meta data is updated to reflect that painful pity that's not necessary)

What's worse than not having good technology?
Having good technology ready in front of you, but not being given to you.

I think "community support" is just way to edgy for me, give me full support backed by the biggest tech company in the world.
I'm not asking for super high transfer speeds, heck, I even acknowledged that with the prices going for Thunderbolt hardware, it renders my Thunderbolt ports useless.
I can live with that, but I'm not asking for something that should be luxury.
I'm asking for file integrity, should be in the top 10 list of things that go without saying for "the world's most advanced desktop OS". :(

Glassed Silver:mac
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
waloshin Avatar
166 months ago
Unless it's bootable it's going to be useless for most people

Linux can boot Zfs there should be no reason why Mac OSX can't.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Makosuke Avatar
166 months ago
ZFS provides some cool stuff in single-drive configurations that I'm interested in for my home server's data volume (for which I could care less if it's bootable, so long as Spotlight can index it, which was a weakness in past Mac ZFS implementations). I'm most interested in RAID-Z, though--it's essentially a pure-software implementation of a similar RAID system to what Drobo uses in their boxes, or a much more advanced RAID-5/6-like system.

If it works as well as the proponents claim it does, it's nearly ideal for a moderate-sized multi-drive home/small business server, where you could RAID-Z, say, 4-6 external drives together into one big 10TB pool of disks with 1-2 drives of redundancy and auto-versioning backups. You'd still want a secondary backup copy of anything truly important, of course, but it would offer a degree of data protection from hardware failure and software corruption you don't really get (again, in theory) from just a hardware RAID5 implementation.

I've had my eye on the announced-but-never-shipped Ten's Complement RAID-Z tier for a while, so now I'm wondering if this new free version will include that as a feature, or if they're dropping it entirely. I can't say I'm optimistic, but who knows.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
milo Avatar
166 months ago
Do you mean data access or safety from failing? I had a few HDD fail on me. When they failed, the BIOS could not detect them anymore about 1-2 weeks after start of problems. For me, that meant: Backup ASAP. No way a different file system would help that.
Well, I take that back. I had erronious sectors once.
File system isn't going to help with complete drive failures, ZFS helps with corrupted bits. It has some checksumming features that can detect and correct (at least in some cases) bad data. The problem with HFS is if bits go bad you won't know about it until the system tries to read and copy them and fails. In the case of data files, if the corrupted data can be read and copied, it will just back up the bad data, which is useless.

Like others have said, Apple just needs to adopt ZFS (or at least create their own equivalent version of it).

And I disagree that it's useless if it can't be booted, in my case the data I care most about is on secondary drives anyway.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Riverrun Avatar
166 months ago
Bootable or not, ZFS would be ideal for storage and backup purposes, I think.

Data protection is a major advantage for any Mac user and having a file system that can protect the integrity of data files can only be a benefit. I will certainly be trying it out.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Rudy69 Avatar
166 months ago
Unless it's bootable it's going to be useless for most people
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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