Apple to Use Sun's ZFS in 'Leopard'

Ahead of Apple's yearly developer conference, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz confirmed Wednesday that the next version of Mac OS X -- code-named Leopard and due in October -- will feature Sun's ZFS file system instead of Apple's HFS+ used previously.

The change to ZFS will bring numerous improvements, including checksums to protect data integrity and the ability to abstract storage space from physical drives using a virtual layer, making it easier to add space. ZFS snapshots also improve backup capabilities, and as a 128-bit file system, potential disk size is virtually unlimited. In addition, built-in compression increases performance by 2-3x, according to Sun.