Why use zfs

Such errors would cause silent data corruption. The 'identity discrepancies' are events where - for example - a sector ends up at the wrong spot on the drive, so the sector itself is ok, but the file is still corrupt. That would be a true example of silent data corruption.

And ZFS would protect against this risk. Of the 1. I have difficulty to determine how many of those drives are SATA drives. Remember that this is a worst-case scenario. To me, this risk seems rather small. If I don't mess up the statistics, you should have a thousand hard drives running for 17 months for a single instance of silent data corruption to show up. So unless you're operating at that scale, I would say that silent data corruption is indeed not a risk a DIY home user should worry about.

Let's take the example of RAID 5. Your NAS can survive a single drive failure and one drive fails. At some point you replace the failed drive and the RAID array starts the rebuild process. During this rebuild process the array is not protected against drive failure so no additional drives should fail.

If a second drive would encounter a bad sector or what people today call an Unrecoverable Read Error during this rebuild process, in most cases the RAID solution would give up on the entire array.

A single 'bad sector' may have the same impact as a second drive failure. Instead of failing the whole drive, ZFS is capable of keeping the affected drive online and only mark affected files as 'bad'. So clearly this is a benefit over other RAID solutions, which are not file system -aware and just have to give up. With CoW, ZFS does not change the location of the data until the write is completed and verified, keeping your data safe in case your system has any problems.

To verify that data, ZFS utilizes checksum metadata to ensure that the data remains the same from write to write. Standard RAID only allows for 2 disk failures per volume. Typically, your mirrors are composed of a single disk and its copy.

With a multi-disk mirror, you can have multiple copies. It has a high cost in disk space, but it can add levels of data integrity not found in typical RAID and is great for read speeds. ZFS is a bit file that can handle enormous data pools of up to 1. This means that the data limitations of ZFS surpass other operating systems, making it scalable and relevant for the foreseeable future. ZFS also eliminates unnecessary limitations to file size along with the number of filesystems and directories, which can make system design difficult.

The line being drawn here is a very bright and functional one: Torvalds is saying that if you want to run in kernel space, you need to keep up with kernel development. From there, Torvalds branches out into license concerns, another topic on which he's accurate and reasonable. But considering Oracle's litigious nature, and the questions over licensing, there's no way I can feel safe in ever doing so.

He goes on to discuss the legally flimsy nature of the kernel module "shim" that the ZFS on Linux project along with other non-GPL and non-weak-permissive projects, such as Nvidia's proprietary graphics drivers use. There's some question as to whether they constitute a reasonable defense now— since nobody has challenged any project for using an LGPL shim for 20 years and running—but in purely logical terms, there isn't much question that the shims don't accomplish much.

The real function of an LGPL kernel module shim isn't to sanction touching the kernel with non-GPL code, it's to protect the proprietary code on the far side of the shim from being forcibly published in the event of a GPL enforcement lawsuit victory. So far, so good, but then Torvalds dips into his own impressions of ZFS itself, both as a project and a filesystem.

It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel I'm an aspiring mystery writer who loves to play with technology, especially Linux. You can catch up with me at my personal website. You can check out my ebooks here. I also write a newsletter about the stuff that most history books miss. Check it out. I just went through a night mare with LVM2 shared from a Linux server to mac books. It would not create the full size of the entire storage pool i.

I installed ZFS and configuration was a snap, the entire 7TB was configure without a problem and performance surpasswd LVM2 by copying the same amount of data in just 10 minutes. Hats of to the ZFS development team as the save my behind and lack of sleep as it is currently am.

Nice article. Please log in again. The login page will open in a new tab. After logging in you can close it and return to this page. Why are People Crazy About it? Pooled storage in ZFS.

Like what you read? Please share it with others. Thank you very much ZFS team Hats off.