Earlier 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
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
Linux can boot Zfs there should be no reason why Mac OSX can't.
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.
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.
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.