10 Reasons You Need to Look at ZFS

[ Thanks to Michael Hall for this link. ]

"Here are the top 10 features that ZFS fans find insanely great:

"1. Checksums in Metadata for Data Integrity

"Data integrity is of paramount importance in ZFS, and is the driver for many ZFS features.

"The file system uses a 256-bit checksum, which is stored as metadata separate from the data it relates to, when it writes information to disk. Unlike a simple disk block checksum, this can detect phantom writes, misdirected reads and writes, DMA parity errors, driver bugs and accidental overwrites as well as traditional "bit rot."

"2. Copy on Write

"ZFS ensures that data is always consistent on the disk using a number of techniques, including copy-on-write. What this means is that when data is changed it is not overwritten — it is always written to a new block and checksummed before pointers to the data are changed. The old data may be retained, creating snapshots of the file system through time as changes are made. File writes using ZFS are transactional — either everything or nothing is written to disk."

Complete Story

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