Yearn for thee, ZFS
My sister called me tonight, frustrated and frantic. She's working in iMovie for the final project of her college career, and OS X keeps yelling at her that her startup disk is full (and it is; only 190 megabytes remain). "It won't even let me add the last frames of the movie" she exclaims: it's clear that something must be done, and quickly.
As we sat talking through all the possibilities for clearing up disk space temporarily - most of which she's a bit squeamish to attempt solo - I mentioned that she could just use her backup drive to offload a part of her massive collection of pre-NBC-bitchslap "Office" episodes to clear up a good chunk of space for a while, then move them back when done. After whining about the time investment even that would take, eventually she assented: what else was she to do?
This is always when myinner1 geek tends to chime in: "If only she were using ZFS... a startup disk that was really just a pool could add space from the backup drive no és problema!" (Yeah, my inner geek has a bit of Mexican in him.)
Unfortunately so far, it's only been the nerds and fanboys that have cared, or even known about ZFS's (albeit read-only) inclusion in the release of Leopard. As such, the Mac-using public marches along with a file system that was originally introduced2 the same year my nearly-college-graduate sister was born. So sayeth "The Architect" himself:
[1] I don't think I qualify for having an "inner" geek: it's all outer geek baby, geek all over.
[2] Yes, I know it was regular HFS released in 1985, and not HFS+. Even still, HFS+ is nearly ten years old at this point, besting ZFS by seven years.
As we sat talking through all the possibilities for clearing up disk space temporarily - most of which she's a bit squeamish to attempt solo - I mentioned that she could just use her backup drive to offload a part of her massive collection of pre-NBC-bitchslap "Office" episodes to clear up a good chunk of space for a while, then move them back when done. After whining about the time investment even that would take, eventually she assented: what else was she to do?
This is always when my
Unfortunately so far, it's only been the nerds and fanboys that have cared, or even known about ZFS's (albeit read-only) inclusion in the release of Leopard. As such, the Mac-using public marches along with a file system that was originally introduced2 the same year my nearly-college-graduate sister was born. So sayeth "The Architect" himself:
"We've rethought everything and rearchitected it," says Jeff Bonwick, Sun distinguished engineer and chief architect of ZFS. "We've thrown away 20 years of old technology that was based on assumptions no longer true today."If Apple Geniuses could tell Paul Photoguy or Greg Garagebandman that they could take that LaCie 1TB drive home and immediately add it as extra capacity to their pre-existing storage setup, I imagine the public as a whole would start getting a lot more excited about things like next-generation file systems... because dammit, we nerds are!
[1] I don't think I qualify for having an "inner" geek: it's all outer geek baby, geek all over.
[2] Yes, I know it was regular HFS released in 1985, and not HFS+. Even still, HFS+ is nearly ten years old at this point, besting ZFS by seven years.