I did wrote about ZFS (Zettabyte file system) on my blog before I started blogging for myMacBUZZ. I thought I should mention ZFS here too. ZFS is an open source file system developed by Sun Microsystem.

Reading about ZFS and hearing some rumors that ZFS file system will be included in the next version of Mac OSX really excites me. Apparently in the recent builds of Mac OSX Leopard, developers have started noticing that there is an option to format a partition using ZFS.

If you are not sure what ZFS is and why you should get excited about it, here is a really well written article about some of the nifty features ZFS has. To sum it up :-

• 128-bit filesystem
• Advance hashing algorithms
• Supports storage pools
• Supports intelligent drive mirroring
• Supports snapshots
• It is fast

Current file system has a limit of how large the size of a single file could be, but in ZFS it has no theoretical limit for a single file. The whole file system could be as big as one Zettabyte, which is one million terabyte or so.

Where can you find a one zettabyte hard disk? You don’t need to. ZFS enable you to add in hard disk just like you add in RAM, if currently you have 250GB disk, add another 250GB and you have 500GB of space (roughly or so). Keep adding as much as you wish.

The very intelligent snapshot feature of ZFS might just be the major feature that enable Apple to have the very cool Time Machine feature in the new up comming Mac OSX Leopard.

To understand more about ZFS read the little post by Paulius over at tech.zamwi.com or visit the ZFS community page.