Brain Drippings

Well, it looks like Mac OS X 10.5 might come with the option of using Sun Microsystem’s zettabyte files system (ZFS), which has some very interesting advantages over other file systems.

WorldOfApple.com has the details

For the record, a zettabyte is 1024⁷ bytes, or 1.18059162 × 10²¹

That is 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 bytes. The maximum size of a zfs drive is actually less than a zettabyte, as it can reference “only” 16 exabytes (1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes or about 1.15 x10¹⁸)

There’s a great blog posting about ZFS by Jeff Bonwick, who is the primary developer at Sun behind ZFS. The title of the posting is the rather amusing, “128-bit storage: are you high?”

As for why the filesystem is named ZFS when its maximal size is a mere 16 exabytes (well short of a zettabyte), Jeff explains in another posting that “Zettabyte File System” is a backronym and that he had to hunt around for something for the Z to stand for. He settled on zetta, the prefix for 10²¹.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 08:19:29 and is filed under Computer, Macs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.