ZFS
Filesystem for virtualization enabling easy reset/rollback via snapshots, File system for NAS with software RAID, snapshots, and data scrubbing
ZFS provides powerful data integrity and snapshot features but requires careful planning for storage expansion and kernel compatibility.
Systems where frequent kernel updates could break the out-of-tree module, Expanding storage by adding more drives after initial setup
Related Tools
FIRST-HAND READS
What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.
“Block-level container migration using native 'zfs send' and 'zfs receive', very short command lines and seems to work perfectly.”
MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2026-07-08
“I also considered USB Bays at first but they wouldn't go well with ZFS”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-07-08
“I don't think I can live without ZFS anymore. Deduplication and snaphots in 2026 are a must.”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-07-08
“zfs is a night and day compared to LVM/mdadm, two tools, rich help, the man pages are reasonably good, and once you understand zfs vs zpool, you're usually good to go.”
POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-07-08
“filled a ZFS pool almost to the brim with no adverse effects”
POSITIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-07-08
“I consider this feature of (Open)ZFS a killer-context for me: It's OS portable.”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-07-08
“I noticed that there are a lot of ZFS myths and cargo culting”
MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2026-07-08
“The primary focus on ZFS storage was another great quality of SmartOS.”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-26
“proprietary version of ZFS with their own extensions that are not compatible with mainline OpenZFS. It can only zfs send/receive to other QNAP devices”
NEGATIVE · integration · Hacker News · 2026-06-19
“I would absolutely be comfortable running ZFS with 12TB on 6GB. Or 2GB, for that matter. It's fine. Send it. I've personally done more with less and had excellent results. No regrets.”
POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-18
“built a rather robust ZFS array on NixOS with a pretty gnarly NVMe cache hierarchy built on LVM. It was fun to do.”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-18
“ZFS is my favorite filesystem. I even use it on single drives because its snapshots and online data integrity checking are so great.”
POSITIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-06-18
“my primary NVMe ZFS server isn't all that much faster in raw throughput - despite being 22x NVMe drives going direct to the CPU instead of 8 HDDs going through a SATA controller. I think it's easier to hit other bottlenecks with ZFS/network transfers well before the disk throughput itself.”
LUKEWARM · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-18
“I've had the hardest time making my TrueNAS ZFS server fast when it was filled with HDD spinning disks”
NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-18
“I've always used ZFS because it's vastly superior to other options”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-18
“ZFS should handle a zvol and a file-on-a-dataset with equal stoicism and reliability”
POSITIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-06-10
“ZFS offering to fix it was massive selling point and the time and based on personal experience, it delivered.”
POSITIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-06-09
“It's pretty impressive how resilient ZFS is, really, given I had what likely to be the worst possible hardware combination.”
MIXED · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-06-09
“I always run my servers on zfs pool mirrored using raid1 on 2 nvme drives”
POSITIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-06-09
“With ZFS, it expects a certain checksum from that part of the tree/file, and so the LBA 234 gets returned it will not match the checksum that is for 123”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-09
“Gives me complete freedom which I can truly enjoy pairing it with ZFS subvolumes tuned for the different content types in my repos”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-09
“ZFS kept reporting corruption, and kept on fixing it in the background”
POSITIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-06-07
“I can't recommend enough using a COW filesystem like btrfs and zfs with snapshots”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-02
“I just take ZFS snapshots. I've restored a couple of times that way just to test DR and it worked pretty well.”
POSITIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-05-19
“I'm extra fond of ZFS backed network root filesystem, because it lets you put an OS on ZFS without needing to deal with ZFS support in that OS”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-07
Have You Used This Tool?
Sign in to share your experience with this tool.
Sign in