A recent post on the ZFS mailing list mentions the Fantom SR44000E 4TB eSATA External Hard Drive w/2-port PCI-Express Card, being sold at NewEgg.com for $999.99. The odd thing is that the drive is nowhere to be seen on Fantom Drive's own web site. Bad sign or just an older product still being sold? As of this writing, no user comments existed for the item, so it's hard to tell if it's a good deal or not. You might read the user comments on other Fantom products, to help you decide.

Simon Breden blogs about his specs for his Solaris 10 x86 server for ZFS. After looking at drive enclosures, I was curious what his system would cost today. All prices are from NewEgg.com as of April 3, 2008.

• Case: Antec P182: $139.99
• Power Supply: Enermax ELT500AWT Liberty 500W SLI $109.99
• Motherboard: Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe $134.99
• CPU: Athlon X2 Dual-Core BE-2350, 45W TDP $94.99
• Memory: Kingston 4GB Unbuffered ECC DDR2 800 (KVR800D2E5K2/2g) $49.99 x 2 = $99.98
• Storage Western Digital 750gb SATA drives, Western Digital WD7500AAKS $139.99 x 3 = $419.97
• Video Card: Nvidia EN6200LE $28.99
• DVD-ROM drive: LITE-ON Black IDE DVD-ROM Drive Model DH-16D2P-04 - OEM $16.99
• OS: Solaris 10 x86 - $0.00

ZFS, (originally the "Zettabyte File System"), is a new filesystem and volume management software by Sun Microsystems and available as open-source since November 2005.

Here are some analogies to compare ZFS vs. traditional filesystem and storage management, to get an idea of how much of a leap ZFS is from previous technologies:

• Broadband Internet vs. dial-up
• Blogging vs. text-editors+FTP
• Email vs. FAX
• CSS vs. table-based layout
• Digital cameras vs. film cameras
• ZFS vs. older filesystems and storage management
• ...you get the idea

After my initial test with ZFS on Mac I had put away the drive I was using as my testbed. I unmounted and unplugged it to do more testing later.

So later on, I decided to remount the ZFS drive and try other things with it. I was still using the IDE/SATA-USB bridge, like I mentioned in my earlier post. As soon as I plugged in the USB cable into the Mac -- *BOOM* -- immediate Grey Screen of Death and the machine was instantly locked up and required a hard reboot. Oops.

Kind of puts a damper on trying a Mac-only solution. I'll try again later when I have time. Maybe it was a fluke?

From Sept 2007, here's Robert Scoble's interview with the creators of ZFS.

One of my big assumptions so far is that using a Mac is feasible as the ZFS host server. Before I got too far into my search for a home ZFS setup, I figured I'd at least first try the Mac ZFS binaries available at MacOSforge.org.

I grabbed a leftover drive from my pile, an 8.6GB behemoth, to use as my testbed. I'm too lazy to put the drive in an enclosure, so I just used one of those IDE/SATA-USB bridges (very handy, for disk recovery and other purposes) to mount the drive.

1. First, download their ZFS binaries and extract them.

2. Backup the original ZFS binaries on your Mac (remember, must be running OS X 10.5/Leopard):

   sudo bash
   mkdir /Users/tony/zfs-backup
   cp -pr /usr/sbin/zfs /usr/sbin/zpool /usr/lib/libzfs.dylib /System/Library/Extensions/zfs.kext /System/Library/Filesystems/zfs.fs /Users/tony/zfs-backup