Sun Microcomputer's latest data management technology (the Zettabyte File System or ZFS) seeks to address the vulnerable areas of current disk management systems: vulnerable to silent data corruption, difficult to manage, and slow. Many current microcomputer OSs fall into this "vulnerable, difficult, and slow" category. Both Apple Inc. and Sun Microcomputer have announced that ZFS is coming to OS X.
This Sun white paper (http://www.sun.com/software/whitepapers/ solaris10/zfs_msft.pdf?cid=920608) compares ZFS abilities with a current server OS: Windows 2003 Server.
http://www.sun.com/software/whitepapers/solaris10/zfs_msft.pdf? cid=920608
One example from the paper deals with the integrity of data on disk and how to ensure that this data does not suffer any "silent" corruption:
"File systems such as Microsoft Windows Server 2003 NTFS permit on- disk data to be inconsistent for varying amounts of time. If an unexpected system crash or reboot occurs while the on-disk state is inconsistent, the file system requires repair during the next boot cycle using a combination of utilities such as CHKDSK and metadata logging that requires a log replay. On the other hand, Solaris ZFS provides consistent on-disk data and error detection and correction, ensuring data consistency while maintaining high performance levels.
"File system corruption can be caused by disk corruption, hardware or firmware failures, or software or administrative errors. Validation at the disk block interface level can only catch some causes of file system corruption. Traditionally, file systems trust the data read in from disk. However, if the file system does not validate read data, errors can result in corrupted data, system panics, or more. File systems should validate data read in from disk in order to detect downstream data corruption, and correct corruption automatically, if possible, by writing the correct block back to the disk. Such a validation strategy is a key design goal for Solaris ZFS."