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While the desktop version of the OS X upgrade will continue to rely on the HFS+ system for managing files on disks, Snow Leopard Server will be the first Apple OS to provide full read-write support for ZFS, and thereby to take advantage of its powerful data integrity and scalability.

Scalability is perhaps its standout feature, since it allows you to add additional disks to a system to enlarge the capacity of a single storage pool, rather than appearing as a separate volume. For server admins the advantages are numerous, but there a clear implications

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for the Mac desktop. Expanding iPhoto and iTunes collections, for instance, could easily be accommodated simply by adding an extra hard drive - no complicated shifting of pictures or tracks from one disk to another.

For the time being however, ZFS will provide server administrators with features such as automatic snapshots of data that can be taken - and backed up - at any time. Not that backups should be so essential, since ZFS always knows which parts of a disk are damaged and won't try to write data to those blocks.

Apple has been nurturing ZFS for some time, initially adding read-only support to OS X Server and to the desktop version via the command line. Last year it released ZFS Read/Write Developer Preview 1.1 for Leopard, which it followed with binaries and source code via its Mac OS Forge open source project.

That all came after Sun Microsystems' chief executive Jonathan Schwartz optimistically said that ZFS would be the default file system in Leopard, which was still several months away. He subsequently removed "default" from his blog post.