Sun Microsystems' chief executive Jonathan Schwartz announced (intentionally or not) that the next version of OS X (10.5) will be sitting on the ZFS file system, which was developed by Sun. I've heard rumors of this for several months now, but I honestly didn't believe they could be true. Moving an OS onto another (completely different) file system is no small thing. Microsoft tried to move from NTFS to an advanced relational database file system known as WinFS and failed miserably. In fact, it was one of the huge "features" that was supposed to make Vista the OS to have and it simply went away in favor of keeping the antiquated NTFS.

But in true Apple fashion, they will apparently pull off that feat and release Leopard in October, complete with the ZFS move. But what's so special about ZFS anyway? The list of advantages is quite impressive. It's hard to explain each one (I don't even understand some of them) but the ones I do get are here:

• Self-healing file system. Each write operation uses a checksum to ensure that there's no data corruption. Claims indicate that this prevents all data corruption unless the hard drive is physically damaged in some extreme ways. If corruption occurs, the file system auto heals itself. No need to scan your drives for errors or for you to buy expensive disk repair software in case of corruption. Wow!
• As the world's first 128-bit file system, ZFS offers 16 billion billion times the capacity of 32- or 64-bit systems.
• ZFS is based on a transactional object model that removes most of the traditional constraints on the order of issuing I/Os, which results in huge performance gains.

After talking with some engineers, I kept hearing the same thing, "This is 20 years beyond most of the major file systems in use today." Since HFS and NTFS are both quite old, this basically just means that ZFS is a modern file system and doesn't suffer from 20 year old technologies.

All in all this is an exciting announcement and will certainly solidify Leopard as the top OS in the consumer market. At least that's where the evidence is pointing right now.

More about the ZFS announcement:
ZFS on Wikipedia