C|Net has a story that ZFS is coming to the Mac. The coolest part about this system is that rather than having a number of drives showing up on your desktop when you plug in a stick or firewire drive, the system will just grow. Now, while I think this is going to be a good thing for many people out there.
If the hype is to be believed, ZFS will act like a RAID 5 setup, it will heal itself and if you treat it nice, cook dinner. It will also backup your drive using a snapshot that takes no space at all – likely what Time Machine will work through. So now in addition to not really needing folders thanks to Spotlight, you won’t really need to think about drives. Everything can and will sit together in one massive mash. But then what about all that time that we spent teaching people about folders and drives and the like?
Some people will certainly throw everything together – I’ve seen a few people who, since Spotlight – keep everything on their desktops and get frustrated by not being able to use names over again, but now more than ever, don’t want to put anything anywhere other than the desktop. This certainly isn’t going to make things easier for support or training people if people take this up fully, but I think we can take solace in the fact that most people are barely even starting to use the 250GB of their first drive and won’t ever need to expand, so we’ll only have to deal with the mess of files. But what about removable storage – how is the OS going to handle the ubiquitous USB drive? That could be a deal breaker if the drive becomes dynamically assimilated (hopefully you have to do something to assimilate your new drives).
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