I was quite excited to see Apple include rudimentary ZFS support in OS X several years ago and was quite disappointed when they decided against using and enhancing it within OS and whipped it out of OS X. I suspect there may have been a bit of toy throwing (out of prams) between Apple and Sun way back then, but that's all water under the bridge.

Well, I'm not the only one who was disappointed and the folks at Ten's Complement have just released a new product that aims to bring ZFS back to the Mac: Z E V O (I'm not sure what the spaces are all about). The Silver edition is available today with the Gold and Platinum editions coming soon.

Here's a quick summary of what you get in each edition:

ZEVO Product Comparison

All well and good and it's great to see someone working to bring ZFS back to the Mac, however I can't help but ask myself one question "What is the point of the Silver Edition"? You get NO redundancy, NO snapshots and you can only use it on ONE external disk. Essentially, you are paying $20 for something that looks like ZFS, behaves like ZFS behind the scenes and that will happily tell you your data is corrupt, but will not be able to actually do anything about it. Seems to defeat the whole purpose of ZFS.

If I were to offer one bit of advice, that would be hold on to your cash until at least the Gold Edition is available.

To me, the Silver Edition is currently just a "Look how cool I am; I've got ZFS on my Mac (but I can't actually take advantage of any of the features that would draw me to wanting to use ZFS in the first place)" box ticker. Nothing more.

In the long run, I hope this product grows and is enhanced to be able to handle way more than the 10 disks advertised for the Platinum edition. I'll certainly be keeping my eyes on this product.