Why is zfs so great

Your NAS chassis can hold a maximum of twelve drives. At some point you want to expand. Furthermore, you can no longer expand your pool, so the remaining two drive slots are 'wasted' 2. You end up with a maximum of ten drives. In this example, to make use of the drive capacity of your NAS chassis, you should expand with another six hard drives. This is illustrated above. Storage-wise it's more efficient to expand with six drives instead of four.

But both options aren't that efficient. Because you end up using four drives for parity where two would - in my view - be sufficient. So, if you want to get the most capacity out of that chassis, and the most space per dollar, your only option is to buy all twelve drives upfront and create a single RAID-Z2 consisting of twelve drives.

Buying all drives upfront is expensive and you may only benefit from that extra space years down the road. So I hope this example clearly illustrates the issue at hand. With ZFS, you either need to buy all storage upfront or you will lose hard drives to redundancy you don't need, reducing the maximum storage capacity of your NAS.

You have to decide what your needs are. This article also got some attention on hacker news. To me, some of the feedback is not 'wrong' but feels rather disingenuous or not relevant for the intended audience of this article. I have provided the links so you can make up your own mind. This article has a particular user group in mind so you really should think about how much their needs align with yours.

No I don't and this is not my intention. I run ZFS myself on two servers. I do feel that sometimes the downsides of ZFS are wiped under the rug and we should be very open and clear about them towards people seeking advice. In the end, you are waisting multiple drives worth of storage capacity depending on the number of drives in your pool. As time goes by, larger disks become cheaper. So it could make sense to expand your pool with mirrors based on bigger drives than the original drives you started out on.

An interrupted write is never committed because the pointer to the new uberblock, which is the last action of a write is never written. This same copy on write architecture enables several other features such as snapshots and clones to happen with minimal resources. By leaving a pointer to the top of the tree for the old data ZFS enables a snaphot, a pointer to a valid copy of data at a particular time. A clone is simply a duplicated pointer which can now move independently from the old pointer.

Unlike other checksummed storage systems, ZFS stores checksums not within blocks, but with the pointers to blocks, all the way up the system metadata tree. If a data storage device returns bad or damaged data, ZFS and OpenZFS file systems examine the parity to discern which disk returned the bad or damaged data; the data is then repaired and the correct data is sent to the user. ZFS is a robust, scalable file-system with features not available in other file systems available today.

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ZFS is limited to running on a single server. ZFS checksum algorithms require processing power and have been known to affect performance. Sun counter-sued later that year, and the legal issues dragged on. By then, Sun was hitting hard times and Oracle swooped in to purchase the company. This sowed further doubt about the future of ZFS, since Oracle did not enjoy wide support from open source advocates. Many remain skeptical of deduplication, which hogs expensive RAM in the best-case scenario.

There are only three ways to expand a storage pool:.