I've been a happy maczfs and also zfsosx user for several years now. TL;DR - the team are amazing at nailing fixes when I've reported issues. I use zfs 100% of the time for my work and sanity - while I can't get a clean shutdown atm, it's rare that I need to anyway, and zfs has my data anyway once sync has completed - the zfs compatibility across OS is a huge win - performance is not a constraint for me, and I'm a very heavy user - datasets and snapshots are almost as nice as openafs vols for management
I'm a heavy user of snapshots and pools, for some inspiration, the LR: 3 main systems, 2x OSX, 1x large FreeBSD physical hosted server. My main work laptop is a 16GB early 2011 MBP with a small 256GB SSD for OS, 1 partitions for each of 4 OS, and a large native ZFS 512GB SSD. Now that I've been using this for a while, I could have survived with a 64GB OS disk, and a 256GB zfs SSD, but hey. If I could fit more ram in, I would. The other boxes are bigger (32GB iMac, 64GB FreeBSD box with ECC RAM, dual disks mirrored ZFS). I use an ashifted zpool which has made a noticeable difference in performance on all the systems I've implemented. I keep my itunes collection (in a zfs filesystem, formD normalisation, noatime) and use the snapshots to keep an up-to-date read-only zfs mirror on the other 2 systems. movies are the reverse, after watching one on the laptop it gets shuffled off to the larger boxes for permanent storage. zfs send is a very easy way to do a very trustable backup, once you get past the first potentially large transfers. All my source code & work lives in a zfs case sensitive noatime copies=2 filesystem, and I replicate that regularly to my other boxes as required. For most customer projects I will have 3 or more VMs running different configs or operating systems under VMWare Fusion. These each live in their own zfs filesystem, compressed lz4 noatime case sensitive. I snapshot these after creation using vagrant install, again after config, and the changes are replicated using zfs snapshots again to the other OSX system, and also to the remote FreeBSD box. Where I can, I spin up these VMs in a zpool-backed ramdisk (with compression) which means I can fit a 20GB disk image into 16GB of RAM and still work effectively. I don't confess to knowing how that actually works but it does. And its very very fast. The specific config for that image is stored in the main SSD and as I'm not writing continuously to it while running the VM, things are peachy. At the end of the project, I can remove the local snapshots as required, and I archive them onto 32GB SD cards (yup) with a zpool and copies=2. They're a nice easy archival format, so long as you have another copy stashed safely too. A couple of months ago, I had a number of hardware failures on the MBP, and each time I was able to guarantee that my data was intact, with full integrity, despite the travesties worked upon it each time it went to the factory for repair. I'd never have been certain with HFS+. I don't have my ~ homedir in zfs just yet, but I've no particular reason not to move it now other than time constraints. with normalisation and case insensitivity I don't think I will see the issues I did under prior versions with less support. Spotlight is not important to me, and finder behaves itself now under Mavericks and the new ZFSOSX builds. In summary, I'm more than happy with the performance once I used ashift=12 and moved past 8GB ram. Datasets once you get used to them are extraordinarily useful -- snapshot your config just before a critical upgrade. A+ Dave -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "zfs-macos" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to zfs-macos+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
