Late last month there was a post on the zfs-discuss email list indicating that Apple may be porting ZFS to Mac OS X. Having read some of docs on ZFS this seems like a great idea. With the ability to easily purchase an Xserve RAID unit up to 7TB, having advanced file system abilities would be a major plus.
A fully loaded Xserve RAID unit runs just over $17k for 7TB. To hit that they use 14 500GB drives. It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to see them using the new Seagate 750GB drive (or something like it) in the future. Using 14 of those would put you at 10.5TB. Given the announced retail price of about $560 for these drives I’d guess that prices for such an Xserve RAID unit could come in around $21k.
There is one more piece to this puzzle that would be really great, an easy to use graphical UI for managing ZFS on OS X. This would be in addition to the CLI tools, not a replacement. So I’m going to wish upon a star for the Apple triple play: ZFS on OS X, a 10TB (or higher) Xserve RAID unit and simple easy to use graphical UI for managing ZFS. And since I have nothing else to do, I’ll predict that this will happen with in the next 12 to 18 months.