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I have little familiarity with ZFS, but HFS+ is certainly more sophisticated than what you see on Windows.

In which ways? I'm not choosing either side, I'm just curious. I don't really give a rat's ass about what filesystem I use, so I know little about it.

God I hate NTFS and its defragging problem. Try a little experiment. Defrag your computer and I mean offline and online defrag. Then reboot, you will see your computer boot fast in less than 20 seconds....well mine does anyway....reboot 3-4 more times and watch your boot times grow longer and longer as the disk gets more fragmented because of all the I/O that is being done. That is the single biggest problem I have....is fragmentation with NTFS.

Not really. NTFS is actually fairly sophisticated. For example, it was built with journaling in mind, while HFS+ had journaling bolted-on as an afterthought.

All the merits go out the window when one has to waste time defragmenting.

Not really. NTFS is actually fairly sophisticated.

Absolutely. NTFS is one of the best things MS has ever done. Compression, encryption, journaling -- it's an advanced FS by most accounts. Completely closing off outside support for it has somewhat invalidated that for multisystem users like me, though. Also, I think it still stores entries by filename, so it can't have hard links and just doesn't have symlinks, but the Windows line was never particularly about hands-on control, so few will miss those.

Anyway, the complaint was about fragmentation. I remember how happy everyone was back in the day about how much better the Win2K defragmenter was than the 98 one. NTFS itself didn't help any. MS didn't design around that little problem. They just improved the tool to manage it.

For example, it was built with journaling in mind, while HFS+ had journaling bolted-on as an afterthought.

Successfully, without breaking backwards compatibility. OS9 can still boot from a journaled HFS (but won't access the journal). Let's see 98 even access an NTFS volume. The first version of NTFS is older than FAT32. There's no excuse for the complete lack of included support in the 9x line. But I digress.

Apple has been very conservative with filesystems. Their own HFS is getting up there, and UFS (which they support with OSX) is about 30 years old now. I know Apple doesn't have a reputation for backwards compatibility, but it's very important to them in this case. They'd rather see the user buy all new software and hardware in order to upgrade than lose one byte of data.

With the new Intel Macs, they jumped over to the default filesystem for EFI so they could have nice, shiny software-firmware integration. Apart from that, I know nothing about it. If they're considering ZFS, their comfort with it must come from the fact that Sun is a big name with lots of experience and a reputation of reliability behind it. But I don't think it would ever be used for the system partition (i.e., replacing HFS/EFI in any way.) ZFS was designed primarily for storage. There aren't even any Solares that can boot from it yet. If the post is for real, it sounds like Apple might be looking to sweeten their oft overlooked Xserve / SAN product lines.

I really hope ZFS makes it into Leopard. I'd love to turn my G4 into a low-power (as in, electricity) fileserver once I get a new system. I'd put Solaris on my Athlon server right now if I could trust that I'd be able to add and upgrade software.