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by arid_eden 1874 days ago
My main issue with ZFS is the integrated nature - like systemd for filesystems. My 'alternative' for ZFS isn't BTRFS (awful performance characteristics for my workloads) but LVM coupled with ext4 and mdraid. I get snapshots, reliability, performance and a 'real UNIX' composable toolchain. I miss out on data checksums.
3 comments

In principle I dislike the coupling of volume manager, raid and filesystem.

But I still think zfs gets most things right; I see the argument for a concistent system managing caching/logs, volumes, data integrity, discard support, compression, snapshots and encryption.

The fact that it's the first serious, open, cross platform solution (Linux, bsd, Mac, winnt) that provides encryption, integrity and filesystem is a nice bonus.

And the integration of snapshots and fs dumps via zfs send/receive is beautiful.

I think zfs makes sense like one fat layer - networking can go below (drdb, iscsi) or on top (iscsi, nfs, cifs).

Encryption need to be somewhat holistic - for making sane performance and data leaking tradeoffs.

Having run all these thing in prod (except BTRFS, it ate a mirror on my desktop), I’ll say that even the LVM + + is so much more hacky than geom on FreeBSD which feels much more ‘Unix’ with a designed composable interface.

Although, I do prefer the durability of XFS or ext4 (depending on workload) vs UFS, and the setup you described is totally maintainable.

No compression..