> Getting back to 'consumer' use for a moment, though, > given that something like 90% of consumers entrust > their PC data to the tender mercies of Windows, and a > large percentage of those neither back up their data, > nor use RAID to guard against media failures, nor > protect it effectively from the perils of Internet > infection, it would seem difficult to assert that > whatever additional protection ZFS may provide would > make any noticeable difference in the consumer space > - and that was the kind of reasoning behind my > comment that began this sub-discussion.
As a consumer at home, IT guy at work and amateur photographer, I think ZFS will help change that. Here's what I think photogs evolve through: 1) What are negatives? - Mom/dad taking holiday photos 2) Keep negatives in the envelope - average snapshot photog 3) Keep them filed in boxes - started snapping with a SLR? Might be doing darkroom work 4) Get acid free boxes - pro/am. 5) Store slides in archival environment (humidity, temp, etc). - obsessive In the digital world: 1) keeps them on the card until printed. Only keeps the print 2) copies them to disk & erases them off the card. Gets burned when system disk dies 2a) puts them on CD/DVD. Gets burned a little when the disk dies and some photos not on CD/DVDs yet. 3a) gets an external USB drive to store things. Gets burned when that disk dies. 3b) run raid in the box. 3c) gets an external RAID disk (buffalo/ReadyNAS, etc). 4) archives to multiple places. etc... 5) gets ZFS and does transfer direct to local disk from flash card. Today I can build a Solaris file server for a reasonable price with off the shelf parts ($300 + disks). I can't get near that for a WAFL based system. The only WAFL I can get is only on networked storage which fails 5) for the obsessed. I can see ZFS coming to ready made networked RAID box that a pro-am photographer could purchase. I don't ever see that with WAFL. And either FS on a network RAID box will be less error prone then a box running ext3/xfs as is typical now. And that's what the ZFS hype is about IMO. As for a the viability of buying one of the boxes, look at what a pro-am photographer might buy. I bought a Nikon D100 for $1600 when it came up. A new lens for $500 and I'm interested in $1000 lenses. Tripod, flash, etc. I spent lots of $$ to capture the images. I'll spend similar to keep them. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
