- TimeMachine doesn't see the drive
- FCPX doesnt support non HFS volumes for media storage
- Performance is terrible overall
The last one is the most serious. I have approximately 2.9TB of data in about 2.5M files. Performance of things that walk inodes, like "ls", "find", spotlight, DaisyDisk on Zevo are multiple orders of magnitude slower than HFS. For instance, DaisyDisk takes a minute or two to scan my volume in HFS. The exact same dataset in ZFS takes over 8 hours. Spotlight runs for 12+ hours, vs a few minutes on HFS, etc. "ls" take a long time to return. "find" runs visibly slow, etc. It was too painful to use, really.
Before giving up on ZFS (because I really don't want to), I decided to experiment with using HFS sparsebundle mounted on top of ZFS, effectively using ZFS as an LVM/RAID solution for HFS. So far, its working pretty well. Performance is back closer to where I would like to see. The bundle presents ZFS with about 300K files in the form of 8MB bands. Presumably this must be easier for it to digest.
Any comments about this approach? I hope that ZFS is preserving sync barriers all the way through (HFS->sparsebundle->ZFS->cache->disks), but I have yet to confirm this.
-Greg