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?

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