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After dabbling with early stuff from the sadly scrapped Apple effort, I started my full time Mac ZFS journey in 2011 with the then Z-410, which then became ZEVO

by xoa 4y ago

After dabbling with early stuff from the sadly scrapped Apple effort, I started my full time Mac ZFS journey in 2011 with the then Z-410, which then became ZEVO which was 10.8 only, and then staying on that (and in turn 10.8 doho) on a Mac Pro 3,1 for a solid 4 years or so. I was really sad when that effort didn't pan out and the company got acquired and then the whole deal was killed, but O3X revived the torch and I moved directly onto that. I've carried my pool forward continuously the whole way, with snapshots and everything, all data scrubbed and known good with no more data rot. It's a damn shame events (software patents) conspired to keep that from becoming a universal native fs, but it's still a wonderful thing and Lundman's amazing consistent efforts have been fantastic. The main site at https://openzfsonosx.org/ https://openzfsonosx.org/ has decently active forums for something niche. Happy to see it pop up here on HN. Without Apple on board or a much bigger effort ZFS on the Mac will probably always have some real limitations particularly with the GUI. For one of my desktop systems I've migrated to running my home and data folders as HFS or APFS formatted iSCSI targets, so it's still on ZFS underneath but appears native to macOS (and that also means that the effective death of towers isn't a limit on storage). But this remains an incredible project IMO. Also for anyone who wants some limited GUI interaction capability, there is a small project called ZetaWatch [0] which will put some ZFS control into a menubar widget. ---- 0: https://github.com/cbreak-black/ZetaWatch/ https://github.com/cbreak-black/ZetaWatch/

hnbear 4y ago
I think I had basically an identical journey to you, through the same ZFS versions. Zevo was really exciting at the time to have a professional looking org behind it, and they came out with a real Sys Prefs plug-in and everything. They'd hired one of the Apple file system devs too. I even wrote my own menu-bar tool way back when - https://github.com/alexwasserman/ZFSStatusScript https://github.com/alexwasserman/ZFSStatusScript Was 8 years ago - no idea if it still works. A while back I moved to just running ZFS on my home lab machines and then exporting over the network to use as necessary.
- xoa 4y ago
  Yeah, I was part of the Z-410/ZEVO beta. It was exciting at the time, quite responsive to our concerns, solid progress. But things fell through with funding or something went wrong in the company I guess. I'll always kind of wonder what might have been on that too, if crowd funding had been a bit more developed maybe. Another smaller layer of "maybes" added on top of what might have been with Apple I guess. It didn't help either that was right around when Apple was abandoning the Mac Pro. IIRC OpenZFS was just starting to kick off around then, still years too early to be of any help to ZEVO. >A while back I moved to just running ZFS on my home lab machines and then exporting over the network to use as necessary. Yeah, it's a decent approach for desktops in particular, and made better by the plummeting cost of higher speed LAN connections. 10 Gbps is cheap and easy at this point, and even faster is getting there. I'm glad to still have O3X around for portable systems though.
  - hnbear 4y ago
    There was definitely a period where O3X was behind but Zevo was dying and I couldn't update because of ZFS version conflicts. Lead to some leaps of faith in beta O3X to get up onto it and the community was pretty active. And still more active today than I'd expect too.

by xoa 4y ago

hnbear 4y ago

I think I had basically an identical journey to you, through the same ZFS versions. Zevo was really exciting at the time to have a professional looking org behind it, and they came out with a real Sys Prefs plug-in and everything. They'd hired one of the Apple file system devs too. I even wrote my own menu-bar tool way back when - https://github.com/alexwasserman/ZFSStatusScript https://github.com/alexwasserman/ZFSStatusScript Was 8 years ago - no idea if it still works. A while back I moved to just running ZFS on my home lab machines and then exporting over the network to use as necessary.

xoa 4y ago
Yeah, I was part of the Z-410/ZEVO beta. It was exciting at the time, quite responsive to our concerns, solid progress. But things fell through with funding or something went wrong in the company I guess. I'll always kind of wonder what might have been on that too, if crowd funding had been a bit more developed maybe. Another smaller layer of "maybes" added on top of what might have been with Apple I guess. It didn't help either that was right around when Apple was abandoning the Mac Pro. IIRC OpenZFS was just starting to kick off around then, still years too early to be of any help to ZEVO. >A while back I moved to just running ZFS on my home lab machines and then exporting over the network to use as necessary. Yeah, it's a decent approach for desktops in particular, and made better by the plummeting cost of higher speed LAN connections. 10 Gbps is cheap and easy at this point, and even faster is getting there. I'm glad to still have O3X around for portable systems though.
- hnbear 4y ago
  There was definitely a period where O3X was behind but Zevo was dying and I couldn't update because of ZFS version conflicts. Lead to some leaps of faith in beta O3X to get up onto it and the community was pretty active. And still more active today than I'd expect too.