Is ZFS ready for prime time?

[Adam Vande More]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 8:11 AM, Ivan Voras <ivoras at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Actually, I don't see anything incorrect in the above archive post.
>

I do.  Cherry picking ZFS deficiencies without addressing the proper
documented way to work around them or at even acknowledging it's possible to
do so is FUD.  It's not like traditional RAID doesn't have it's own set of
gotcha's and proper usage environment.

Dismissing the value of checksumming your data seems foolhardy to say the
least.  The place where silent data corruption most frequently occurs, in
large archive type filesystems, also happens to be one of the prime usage
candidates of RAIDZ.


>
> As for specific problems with ZFS, I'm also pessimistic right now - it's
> enough to read the freebsd-fs @ freebsd.org and zfs-discuss @
> opensolaris.org lists to see that there are frequent problems and
> outstanding issues. You can almost grep for people losing data on ZFS
> weekly. Compare this to the volume of complaints about UFS in both OSes
> (almost none).
>

There are actually very few stories of ZFS/zpool loss on the FreeBSD
list(some are misidentifications of issues like this:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2010-September/009417.html),
another source I would point you to is http://forums.freebsd.org/.  The
single recent valid one I can find involves a pool on geli, but I will grant
you that it happens at all is quite disconcerting.

There have been a lot of other ZFS issues ranging from performance, NFS
troubles, quirks on storage controllers not present when using UFS, to other
as-yet unexplained oddities.  Many of these are corner cases, and I think
they have mostly been resolved.  If you've happened to encouter one, I'm
sure it's left a sour taste though.  UFS has it's own set of
issues/limitations so regardless of what you pick make sure you're aware of
them and take issues to address them before problems occur.

-- 
Adam Vande More