Comment by tjoff
6 years ago
I feel ZFS are much better and easier than md or LVM. At least had it been properly supported (I have never tried ZoL).
CoW and cheap snapshots are game-changers, checksums as well but maybe not from a practicality and home-user standpoint. This holds just as well on PB storage as a 512 GB OS drive as a 2 GB thumb-drive (not that I would use ZFS on a thumb drive - again because of proper support across different OS).
Checksums are amazing for when you do have a problem, because a scrub will tell you what you lost. Knowing what's been damaged is practically more important then actually fixing it, and ZFS is great at this.
All the Linux alternatives answers to this problem are always "is your data okay? Don't know! It'll be a surprise when you get there".
I know, and personally that is very important for me.
But in practice, it is likely to be less than once in a decade problem - and you should have backups anyway.
So I can understand someone having different priorities. (not me though, data integrity is as important as it gets, I'd gladly pay performance/money for it)
What about the performances, is ZFS in the same ballpark than an equivalent (data-protection-wise) 'md' layout?
There are ways to improve the perf but the copy on write arch does come with performance taxes in my experience. The trade off is a whole richer experience than a simple ext4 partition for example.