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Topic starter 01/08/2025 9:58 pm
🧠 ZFS (Zettabyte File System) is a high-performance, enterprise-grade file system originally developed by Sun Microsystems in the early 2000s. It’s now maintained as OpenZFS, and it’s beloved by sysadmins and data hoarders alike for its robustness, scalability, and data integrity features.
🚀 What Makes ZFS Special
- Combined file system + volume manager: No need for separate tools—ZFS handles both
- Copy-on-write (CoW): Prevents data corruption by never overwriting existing data
- Snapshots & clones: Create point-in-time backups and writable copies instantly
- Data integrity checks: Detects and auto-corrects silent data corruption
- RAID-Z: A smarter alternative to traditional RAID, with better fault tolerance
- Dynamic storage pools: Add drives on the fly—ZFS handles the rest
📐 Technical Specs
| Feature | ZFS Capability |
|---|---|
| Max volume size | 256 quadrillion zettabytes |
| Max file size | 16 exbibytes |
| Filename length | Up to 1023 ASCII characters |
| Supported platforms | FreeBSD, Linux (via OpenZFS), macOS (FUSE), Solaris |
🧪 Real-World Use Cases
- NAS systems: Home and enterprise storage servers
- Backup solutions: Reliable snapshots and replication
- Virtualization hosts: Fast disk I/O and data protection
- Data centers: Scalable storage with built-in redundancy
⚠️ Things to Know
- ZFS is not natively supported in the Linux kernel due to licensing conflicts
- It requires plenty of RAM—often 1 GB per TB of storage
- Once a disk is added to a pool, it can’t be removed without destroying the pool
