Once upon a time, Apple came very close to releasing ZFS as part of MacOS. Apple did this work in its own copy of the ZFS source base (as far as I know), but the people in Sun knew about it and it turns out that even today there is one little lingering sign of this hoped-for and perhaps prepared-for ZFS port in the ZFS source code. Well, sort of, because it’s not quite in code.
I love stories like this – digital archeology focusing on the relatively recent past.
That’s pretty cool.
OpenZFS on MacOSX (O3X) used to be a good option, but, it seems it isn’t updated so much. Latest version only supports Sierra, and it seems the last post in the FAQ about it says there is a dev branch that supports High Sierra, and that 10.13 support is coming.
10.14 is almost out, though.
In the modern era of appliances and what not, having it native on MacOS is less and less useful.
Easier to make a FreeNAS/ZFS box and stuff it with drives, and use that than plugging them in to the Mac directly.
I don’t know if a NAS appliance with all those settings for network, sharing protocols, shares, users, permissions, etc, is easier than formatting a big full of disks plugged directly in via command line. You certainly wouldn’t get the same level of performance
Besides, ZFS offers some cool features that APFS doesn’t,
I think that there are quite a few big sites that still use it after writing a bunch of code assuming Apple was going to move over to it and then decided not to. I saw an article in ArsTechnica or some place like that a couple years ago. I couldn’t find the article though.