On Sat, 20 Dec 2025 09:26:30 +0100 Niels Dettenbach <[email protected]> wrote:
> With UFS on hardware RAID you are far aeay from most of that - even with > sophisticated backup tools etc.. I understand the benefits of ZFS, however there are alternatives if ZFS is not practical or usable on a particular platform. RAID: If you need this then hardware RAID is a viable alternative to ZFS RAID and works consistently across different OSes which have their own different file systems. Data encryption and integrity: Disk firmware should implement these features internally and transparently. ZFS duplicates this functionality as it was designed back in the days of cheap HDDs. Modern SSDs can handle this automatically. However when people say - "we don't trust the hardware so need ZFS checksums just in case..." but by the same logic who is checking that ZFS is completely bug free and never fails? If you don't trust the hardware then you also don't trust the CPUs to execute correct instructions and the ECC memory to return correct data. Inline compression: Saves some I/O in return for higher CPU usage. However disk storage is cheap and SSD/NVMe disks have plenty of bandwidth, so not a killer feature. Snapshots: Nice ZFS feature but other file systems like UFS support limited snapshots and dump/restore if you want to avoid rsync. It really depends on your usage scenarios, some people find it extremely useful, some don't. I'm not saying ZFS is useless. If you deploy zones/jails/containers and need delegated ZFS datasets then this feature is important. However all this extra complexity comes at a cost: reliability and maintainability. ZFS is not just a file system but a load of other "kitchen-sink" solutions bundled together.
