HN Explorer

Ask HN: How can ZFS benefit me?

2 points by nalzok ↗ HN
I'm an undergraduate in Statistics. I read some articles about how great ZFS is, but most of them mainly talk about data integrity. Of course that's important, but I didn't lose any data with the 256G SSD of my MacBook Pro for years anyway (I accidentally deleted some files once, but that's a human error).

I'm also not using RAID to store Zebibytes of data, and speaking of encryption and read/write efficiency, other filesystems can offer similiar fetures.

So, how can ZFS benefit me?

2 comments

[ 98.2 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] thread
db48x
You didn't lose anything that you know about, but that's only because OSX cannot tell when something gets lost. If a single bit were flipped in one of your files, it might look like a typo, or single frame of video with a minor glitch, or it might be a program that crashed for no apparent reason.

I use ZFS, and there aren't errors all that often; only once in the last four years or so. ZFS was able to recover the data and give it to the application, and everything was fine. The only reason I know about it is that ZFS keeps a count of how often it happens on every drive in your system: not very often, but too often.

wmf
ZFS benefited you by inventing features that were later copied by the filesystem that you currently use.