waffle

Michael Tsai sums up the argument on ZFS between Drew Thaler and MacJournals.

I think the biggest point of amazing negligence of any side is to look past what ZFS really means. A ZFS pool with every feature turned on is unweildy, disk hungry and more CPU consuming than your average file system. And MacJournals assumes that this is the way it is, and under these circumstances correctly derives that it might be good for big RAID setups and not much more. But. “Everything on” isn’t the only way to run ZFS. You can turn off snapshots and basically every other space eating feature (I’ll have to pass on commenting the 128K requirement for storing extra attributes).

The big whoop about ZFS vs HFS+ is that while HFS+ will work for most of us just fine for another ten years, a ZFS with all the bells and whistles turned off will work just as well. Furthermore, when those ten years are over it will continue to scale and offer good solutions when HFS+ has bottomed out, and in the meantime we can turn on any bells and whistles we deem worthy of the requisite tradeoffs.

How any part of this debate can not write this out in big bold letters is beyond me. ZFS has been designed to be better for the future than HFS+ has been (the 128-bit limits is reckoned to be of real use only in about twenty to thirty years when the biggest potential users will start to saturate the 64-bit space) and if you don’t care about its advanced features, that’s where the attraction lies.

As for case-insensitivity? Already implemented.