Apple is planning to use Sun Microsystems' Zettabyte File System (ZFS) for its OS X operating system, Sun employee Eric Kustartz said on an OpenSolaris mailing list.

"Chris Emura, the file system development manager within Apple's CoreOS organisation, is interested in porting ZFS to OS X," Kustartz wrote in a posting last week.

"Speaking for the ZFS team [at Sun], this is great news and we fully support the effort."

Apple did not return a request for additional information, citing a company policy of not commenting on products before they are released.

A file system determines how data is structured and stored on a hard drive or series of hard drives.

ZFS is the world's first 128-bit file system, providing 18 billion times the storage capacity of a current-generation 64-bit system. A zettabyte is equal to 1,024 exabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

The file system promises better data integrity through a combination of features. The technology does not overwrite data on a disk like current generation file systems, but saves the new data first and then deletes the information that it replaces.

This prevents data loss in the case of a system outage. The system also has built-in checks designed to prevent data corruption.

Sun launched the technology last November as part of OpenSolaris. The company said at the time that ZFS would be made available as part of Solaris, the commercial version of the operating system, by May 2006.

Sun has made the technology available under the open source Common Distribution and Development Licence, allowing developers to use it in other products such as OS X free of charge, and without having to release the source code if they make any adjustments.