Disenchanted with ZFS; alternatives?
Kirk Strauser
kirk at strauser.com
Mon Dec 1 07:59:12 PST 2008
I have ZFS on my 7.1-PRERELEASE system, and while it does some spiffy things,
in general I'm a bit underwhelmed.
PROS:
Adding new filesystems on a whim is really nice.
It has a lot of really cool other features that I will probably never need.
CONS:
I have nearly 3GB of wired RAM, but it doesn't seem to be all that fast.
For example, starting an Amanda backup on a UFS2 filesystem would get through
the "estimate" phase almost instantly on a system that had been up for several
days because of cached filesystem data. On ZFS, it still limps along even if I
just finished the last backup a few minutes earlier.
Other than saying "I'm using ZFS", I don't seem to have much to show for it.
WTF:
"Raidz and top-level vdevs cannot be removed from a pool."
At this point, I'm almost ready to go back to good ol' UFS2, but I'd hate to
give up that easy addition of new filesystems. I *could* have a single 700GB
root FS but that just doesn't seem right. Are there any good, tested GEOM-
based ways of getting that functionality, perhaps along the lines of using
something like gvirstor and growfs as needed?
- Kirk
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