Comment by Seenso
6 years ago
> The benchmarks I've seen do not make ZFS look all that great.
The thing about ZFS that actually appeals to me is how much error-checking it does. Checksums/hashes are kept of both data and metadata, and those checksums are regularly checked to detect and fix corruption. As far as I know it (and filesystems with similar architectures) are the only ones that can actually protect against bit rot.
https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/Checksums
> And as far as I can tell, it has no real maintenance behind it either any more, so from a long-term stability standpoint, why would you ever want to use it in the first place?"
It has as much maintenance as any open source project: http://open-zfs.org/. IIRC, it has more development momentum behind it than the competing btrfs project.
> those checksums are regularly checked to detect and fix corruption.
I don't believe that's true. They are checked on access, but if left alone, nothing will verify them. From what I've read, you need to setup a cron job that runs scrubbing on some regular schedule.
Yes. Those cron jobs are installed by default by all major vendors that supply/support ZFS.
The setup instructions for ZFS always include the "how to setup regular scrubs" step.