Apple chucks ZFS for OS X 10.6

Robert Hallock (Thrax)

June 10, 2009 11:06 AM ET in News, , , , , ,

giantappleCuriously absent from the marketing material associated with Apple’s newest iteration of OS X is any mention of ZFS.

It appears that the Cupertino firm may have bailed on Sun’s enterprise-class Zettabyte File System– a move that is in part responsible for the significant disk footprint reduction offered by OS X 10.6.

Apple has pledged that the newer, leaner Snow Leopard is a refined, but not revolutionary product. After lightening the operating system’s bulk by 6GB, porting the majority of its applications to a 64-bit code base, and punching up the version numbers on a select apps, Apple slapped the kitty on the ass and sent it on its way.

While ZFS may have been told to take a hike, it is apparent that ye olde HFS+ is standing guard to serve the storage whims of Apple’s shiny, happy faithful.

15 Comments:

  1. Gargoyle
    10 Jun '09, 4:06 pm

    I've wondered if removing PPC compatibility saved disk space, too.

  2. Thrax
    10 Jun '09, 4:08 pm

    Absolutely. That's a whole lot of legacy code that's no longer needed.

  3. Jonathan Gardner
    10 Jun '09, 5:54 pm

    At least with the removal of all of that code we will get some more room for music and pictures...

    Bright side?

  4. kryyst
    10 Jun '09, 6:03 pm

    If you are on an intel mac it's good news no two ways about it. If you are on a PPC, leopard is still solid. It just means you are slowly being left behind.

    But for us intel boys snow leopard shall be a nice boost. Bloat cut out, speed tweaks and stability improvements. Full sails ahead. Least of all $29 for the upgrade version for all woo hoo

  5. Gargoyle
    10 Jun '09, 6:34 pm

    Is there an upgrade path for Tiger, or is there only the full-price retail box?

  6. Snarkasm
    10 Jun '09, 7:28 pm

    Is there a chance they dumped ZFS thanks to the Oracle/Sun buyout? Licensing issue or something?

  7. Thrax
    10 Jun '09, 7:39 pm

    More than likely because it's totally pointless. ZFS is an enterprise FS with enhancements for real virtualization and databasing, neither of which Snow Leopard is going to be doing.

  8. Buddy J
    10 Jun '09, 8:00 pm

    I'm just glad it'll free up space on my mom's Mac Mini. I haven't had time to put in a proper sized hard drive yet.

  9. jared
    10 Jun '09, 9:57 pm

    I agree with Thrax. More or less, it would of been totally pointless.

    If we want to really point fingers, we could mention the never-to-be-seen WinFS ....

  10. Thrax
    10 Jun '09, 10:04 pm

    WinFS is now a part of MSSQL's internal file system.

  11. Cliff_Forster
    11 Jun '09, 3:25 am

    Mildly off topic, but not really...

    How freaking old is OSX now?? Its kinda like Gmail still is in Beta. Kodiak/Cheetah/Puma Jaguar/Panther/Tiger/Leopard/Snow Leopard. All iterations of OSX.

    Think one day Apple will work less at looking innovative, and work more at actually innovating?

  12. jared
    11 Jun '09, 4:36 am

    lol, I don't think Windows users have much room to talk about innovating.

    Win7 is finally bringing something new to the table (which Vista should of had), and how many years has it been

  13. Cliff_Forster
    11 Jun '09, 1:45 pm

    Jared,

    Microsoft does not nickel and dime its users for its service packs either.

  14. jared
    11 Jun '09, 2:17 pm

    No, they just charge an arm and a leg when they release a new OS (then they put out about 7594387593847 different versions) - which until now has been about every 5-6 years.

    So I suppose it's about even then?

  15. C.Shamis
    29 Jun '09, 6:29 pm

    Cliff:

    Leopard has had 7 service packs since its debut in 2005; all of which have been free. On average, that works out to about one every 6 months. Windows XP was released in 2001 and had... 3. Even though Windows has had thousands of hotfixes, MS only "rolls them up" into full-fledged Service Packs once every 3 years on average. So... I guess they just do things differently.

    -C.

Troll-free since 2003 ®