[simcop2387]

For a little more detail about this, it's somewhat common for these controllers to lie about when thinks hit the disk. They'll cache it and then write either out but if they lose power or a write gets corrupted zfs will have no way of discovering it until it's too late.

[bsuh]

Are other file systems better off with recovery when interacting with virtual disks and host power failure?

[IgorPartola]

They are not, but they are better at swallowing the errors and not bothering you with such details. ZFS fails fast & early, while EXT4 will fail when you realize your Postgres DB is borked.

I guess it's possible that some type of disk command timing could cause unexpected lockups or slowdowns that you wouldn't get with a system that doesn't try to control the hardware to quite the same extent as ZFS, but my (cursory) understanding is that it's rare/hardware specific.

My personal take is that running ZFS on hardware that lies is no worse than running EXT4 on it. YMMV as I'm not a storage expert.

[pkaye]

Search online for published papers related to "IRON File Systems." Some researchers injected errors into various parts of common file systems and see how well they recovered. I think ZFS was the best of the bunch though that research is from a few years back and things may have improved elsewhere.

[fulafel]

The IRON paper doesn't mention ZFS, I found some citing papers that focus on ZFS but have no comparisons.

[pkaye]

Yes you are right. I believe it was a different paper by the same research group... http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kadav/zfs/zfsrel.pdf

[fulafel]

If the storage lies about syncs, the best you can hope for is replaying a consistent state somewhere in the past. Log structured filesystems with checksums would be a good bet here.

[ryao]

The short answer is no.

[aidenn0]

Short answer "no" with a longer answer of "ZFS is sometimes better than most other options"