Commercial ZFS on OS X
I’ve been keeping a close eye on the progress of the ZEVO product from ten’s complement, eagerly awaiting its official release.
Well, that finally took place recently, and I picked up the only version they’re currently shipping, the silver edition.
It’s a great product, but the silver edition isn’t terribly useful for me. My current NAS at home is still running OpenSolaris and is based on the vestiges of Sun’s ZFS implementation. It’s been going strong for many years now without any issues. It’s getting to the point however where it’s time to update both the hardware and software. My hope is to use at least the ZEVO gold edition, if not the platinum edition from a brand new mac mini with some thunderbolt drives.
The current NAS is a DIY box with a RAIDZ across 3 drives, a 4th always on for daily backup, and a 5th that’s rotated weekly for an offsite backup. I intend to replicate this, just with larger drives, which puts me squarely in the platinum camp.
So far I’ve only been using ZEVO on a single external SSD which houses a lot of my virtual machines for other operating systems, but it’s been great thus far. I’ve noticed an oddity where I have to reattach the drive several times once in a while, but that could just as easily be an issue with the enclosure I’m using, which is getting pretty long in the tooth.
At any rate, if you’re in the market for a commercial grade no fuss ZFS for OS X, ZEVO delivers. I anxiously look forward to its future, and availability of some external thunderbolt drive enclosures for that matter to pair with it.