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filesystemszfs

Does anyone have experience with ZFS?

I am considering to adopt ZFS and I would be happy to know your experience in both production and testing environment.

Solution

  • I am not using ZFS in production - had no chance yet. Well, basically we have no need for giant storage currently and also we did not run any 7.0 up until recently.

    At home I have a FreeBSD system (7.0-ish) which is more bleeding edge. I have been using ZFS for almost eight months now. I currently have a 1.2 TB in my tank. I like ZFS a lot, for multiple reaons:

    • grow my filesystem on demand
    • storage from "inexpensive" disks
    • filesystem snapshot
    • self-healing
    • copies (this is probably the most awesome of it all)

    If you are looking to try it out and like FreeBSD, I'd recommend the FreeBSD wiki.

    I have had some of the issues that are outlined on the wiki and I had a lot of help/feedback from people on irc (#freebsdhelp @ Efnet). I haven't lost any data though. :) (Knock on wood!) If you are looking for more feedback, you can check back on IRC. There are a bunch of people who run ZFS pools.

    Aside from FreeBSD, ZFS has been around for a while on the sun platform. It's more way more mature there since what I run on FreeBSD is a port and a lot of work in progress. :)