What Is ZFS?: A Brief Primer

[@DrathVader]

I love how a 30+ minute video is a brief primer on this channel. No, I'm not being sarcastic, I actually love that.

[@NWinnVR]

Right!? Some of us have a longer attention-span than a goldfish...

[@Lead_Foot]

ZFS is not very beginner friendly.

[@BjarkeBruun]

@@Lead_Foot you are not suppoed to change it out with XFS or ext4 afterwards, it is a learning process that you'll stick with for the rest of your life, so you have time to learn :-)

[@axnyslie]

There's another channel that has an introduction to ZFS video that's 90 minutes long. Just the introduction.

[@thingsiplay]

Others do a 12 minutes video and title it "everything you want to know about zfs".

[@KushalPandya]

Oracle acquiring Sun is classic example of some evil corp buying a really good company and destroy it.

[@hassanzahin7852]

Actually Sun Microsystems intentionally chose a license that isn't GPL compatible so that Linux can't add zfs drivers in it's kernel.

[@ThePhoneix999]

@@hassanzahin7852 isnt the legal opinion on this divided? Strictly talking about openzfs.

[@Kusriyason]

@@hassanzahin7852 That was not why CDDL was made and this has been hashed many times by the people that created ZFS and got Sun to try to open source their stuff. The suits didn't like the fact that the GPL didn't preserve certain rights to the business, and the Apache License while good wasn't quite enough to make the suits feel better so they made the CDDL which was the GPL and MIT licenses mashed together with all the bits that made the suits feel nervous stripped. They also say hind sight being 2020 they regret not fighting harder sooner to get it licensed into an existing opensource license. The FUD that they made the CDDL as some sort of genius mastermind plot because they hated the GPL is just that, FUD

[@Kusriyason]

@Richard Clutterbuck Yeah that's right on that. Ubuntu is basically saying by precedent currently a user can choose to do whatever they want, so "ZFS is no different than loading the NVidia drivers, fite me" in effect. Nobody really wants to take up that fight because if they win they basically kick Linux hardware support in the shin, if they lose they weaken the GPL.

[@axelfoley133]

Oracle watched 300 and thought that classic line was brilliant. Oracle: "Our errors... will blot out the Sun!"

[@EposVox]

Time to take notes!

[@TheDemocrab]

Excellent, this comes up literally the same day I buy three 6TB drives for my first ZFS setup. :D

[@erisdiscordia5547]

Hope you didn't buy any of the SMR drives :D

[@blackmennewstyle]

@@erisdiscordia5547 Yep it's basically what happened to me, they were all these fake WD Red 6Go NAS HDDs, i bought them before the issue was exposed...

[@LND3947]

I would check that they aren't on this list, if they are, return them now and get a product not on this list. The list: www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/list-of-known-smr-drives.141/

[@praecorloth]

Hopefully I'm not too late. Save yourself a lot of time and headache. Get another 6TB drive, and set up a pool of mirrors. RAID5/RAIDZ is dead.

[@mdd1963]

better hope none of them are SMR drives!

[@Gilgwathir]

Wendell:"Brief primer" Me: "Really? Brief?" Wendell: "30 minutes" Me: "Oh, ok! That's very brief for ZFS!"

[@martinquintana2458]

I was thinking the same thing. 30 min video 😅

[@WebMedics]

I’m so glad people like you are working so hard to educate us; I owe you. If you are ever in London, my house is your house.

[@thomasesr]

I love ZFS, it is the best FS I've used, at work and at home. I really like the snapshot functionality

[@bassbatterer]

It's pronounced ZFS not ZFS.

[@sinizzl]

>Americans can't even pronounce ZFS as ZFS

[@plapbandit]

What on earth are you talking about, CLEARLY its ZFS. I mean come on, ZFS just sounds... silly

[@techzone2009]

It's aladeen not aladeen 🙏

[@tin2001]

I read every one of those as "zed eff ess".

[@clansome]

@@tin2001 Me too

[@sandro-here]

This is probably the best ZFS explanation I've ever encountered in my life.

[@KenS1267]

I use ZFS everyday, we use it on most of our storage devices, and I'm still learning new stuff about it on a regular basis. Sun really did some great work.

[@NickNorton]

As a viewer from the overseas. I appreciate your Aloominum vs. Al-u-min-i-um - I mean Zed vs. Zee distinction.

[@pappyman179]

As an American, I do to. Not sure why, but I do.

[@jamesrockford5145]

American men dont wear bonnets. I would never drive a car with a wind screen, I prefer a wind shield

[@tenminutetokyo2643]

Nick Norton Everyone in US says Aluminum. Even our Aloominum foil in grocery stores has it printed on the box.

[@NWinnVR]

Thank you for this. Having someone like you explain it is so much more digestible than reading a ton of technical documents.. Would love to see a video like this for *XFS* ! But if you don't want to that's totally understandable.

[@Alphahydro]

Good stuff Wendell. For months I poured over reviews of raid cards to run a raid 5 array. Then I was introduced to FreeNAS and ZFS, and when I found out all was needed was a decent hba, I was sold. ZFS is crucial for data protection.

[@mrlithium69]

This is the best reason. Redundancy brought to the masses with inexpensive HBA cards, and all you really need is a bunch of RAM to run it, which we have. ECC is not even required, its just important to have. Also, its open source and we can tell what its doing. Using something like FreeNAS will teach you ZFS and BSD at the same time, if you decide to use the command line, and take control of your own data destiny.

[@touristguy87]

...yep, can't have data-protection without zfs!

[@Alphahydro]

@@touristguy87 I can't see it any other way

[@yanniskouretas8688]

2:50 oh the days we've had SUN-BLADE workstations with Solaris OS , SPARC processors and the rest .... such nice systems to work on ... some still survive till today (almost 20 years later)... only a few of us original IT guys know how to use and administer them so their days are numbered (in preeeeeeetty small number).

[@trumanhw]

I was selling Sun Ultras (off lease) from Ford ... to the tune of 300 x Month

[@watchinstuff5726]

Thanks!

[@linkdude64]

Wow - thanks for the shot at 13:00 of your old offices. It made me realize how long I've actually been watching your videos! Boy, how time flies...thanks, Wendell!

[@hovh03]

How about 1 minute intro: 1. ZFS - a file system on top of 1 or more "hard" drives. It supports things other file system supports: a. Write/change/read/create/delete files b. Drives can be partitioned. 2. ZFS itself supports redundancy (multiple storages) in case of failure (by detection of checksum mismatch), and as a result can have better data integrity and security against failures and helps with recover. 3. It supports clone, snapshot, journaling that keeps history (such as old modified data, at the cost of spaces), compression out of the "box". 4. It is much slower, takes a lot more spaces, and there are not many "standard" GUI that performs almost all functions out of the box for ZFS. You can't easily resize, unless you do a copy and delete old one.

[@emileturcotte8304]

I enjoy these types of videos way more than tech news on the other channel, I would really like if the focus would shift towards teaching material such as this!

[@bdhaliwal24]

Thanks for this great fireside chat Wendel, you are the best

[@erisdiscordia5547]

I'd love a video on ZFS tuning. So far, all articles etc. on this topic have been a complete mystery to me, the documentation is just not very helpful to me in this regard. It only talks about hundreds of tunables without any comprehensive explanation (that a person without a deep understanding of the source code could understand) what they mean.

[@xxcr4ckzzxx840]

+1

[@bobhope1160]

Yeah same

[@jokinboken]

The books Wendell recommended at the end are very good. Try them.

[@andarvidavohits4962]

Create a pool and a dataset. Run 'zpool get all | less', run 'zfs get all | less'. Read through all the flags and properties, Google them and learn about them in the manuals 'man zfs', 'man zpool'. Read openzfs.org/wiki/Performance_tuning and start tweaking the settings with 'zpool set' and 'zfs set'. Once you're comfortable tweaking through the ZFS commands, you can start tweaking your OS' kernel parameters and the ZFS services, if need be.

[@autohmae]

go to ZFS subreddit, it's pretty good

[@dtesta]

You have a good voice for explaining. Kudos.

[@AndreasRavnestad]

I started using ZFS a few days ago, and I was really blown away at how incredibly simple it was. I wanted to configure four identical disks in RAID 10, and this was the only command I had to use: $ sudo zpool create NAME mirror VDEV1 VDEV2 mirror VDEV3 VDEV4 And that was it. No need for formatting or lenghty initialization processes. It just worked right away, and performance is excellent. I'm sure ZFS can get really complicated for more intricate setups with caching and tiering and tuning, but for my simple use case it was refreshing to see how easy it was.

[@happilicious]

Thank you Wendell, this is one of the best introduction to ZFS, it's clear and concise, it's easy to understand from a beginner's perspective. Would love to see more of this type of video!

[@mkcraghead]

Awesome video and explanation of ZFS. Now I have the bug to want to learn more. Thanks so much. 👍

[@SeaJay_Oceans]

8:21 drives. ZFS START: 17:41

[@wildmanjeff42]

2 years later--ZFS is still rock solid and I have to say the only time I have lost data, is when I tried to use the command line to move data instead of TrueNas native data transfer. Probably error on my part. I understand more now about ZFS, and love freeBSD which natively supports it and so I have not done anything with BTRFS. Great Informative video !

[@housr]

Thank you, chill background music.I enjoyed this.

[@bertnijhof5413]

I live in a country with 2 to 14 power-fails/week and I had a lot of garbled music files, so I'm very happy with ZFS and its Copy On Write. I even have my dataset with music stored with copies=2, basically introducing a mirror for that dataset in an otherwise striped datapool.

[@bertnijhof5413]

@amitranaware9356 That is why I have a 1200W Avtek Surge Protector. But in general power supplies and motherboards die more often, because of power fails.

[@hasmich]

This is so informative and well-explained! Respect man!

[@PartySlothy]

Great high-level overview video Wendell! I wonder if you do a next installment could you fit unRAID (XFS/BTRFS) in there with a similar approach? Like basic overview, differences, applications?

[@utvikler-no]

Im amazed on how simple you manage to explain this complex topic. Thanks for all the effort you put in to your videos! Btw: I think its pronounced ZFS ..

[@kolrising]

This was so incredibly helpful and educational. Thank you so much!

[@supernenechi]

you said asymptomatic in such a way I just knew this was uploaded this year

[@pteriss]

Love your videos, Wendell! Thanks!

[@Scrub_Ghost]

Thank you so much. Eye opener!

[@faysoufox]

Thank you for this video, you did a good job dimystifying zfs

[@jorrenb]

Love your work my friend! thank you so much for your splendid explanation

[@TheKev507]

Would love to hear a comparison between ZFS, WAFL, and Nimble CASL

[@JeandrePetzer]

Very well explained, insightful video. Thank you for this.

[@kernelpickle]

Obviously ZFS is more mature than BTRFS, because you can’t tell me that whoever came up with the name wasn’t thinking “butterface” as in a lady with a nice body, but an ugly face-which isn’t exactly the worst description of BTRFS as a file system…

[@BlackProductionInc]

Thanks man, this was both informative and your voice is like unix ASMR :3

[@brianmccullough4578]

I put butter on everything, just not my file system. BTRfs is catchy, like you can't say "I can't belive its not ZFS" it doesn't roll off the tounge

[@mdd1963]

Once Redhat abandoned BTRFS as an option, it was doomed...

[@TheEbbemonster]

Excellent high level video. Just migrated from a Synology to my home build Ubuntu, and needed to understand what the ZFS hype was all about.

[@bgable7707]

OMG, PBS couldn't have done a better job at explaining this. I was with DEC back when ... This was the type of information that was available daily. It's great to see it again. Hit SUBSCRIBE, "YES"

[@pappyman179]

Thanks Wendell, I love these, now when is the next one? ;-)

[@m1kr0kosmos]

Thanks! Been doing flashes of OpenBSD & Ubuntu, both of which offer 'experimenting' with ZFS. Gonna try them out today

[@Redmage913]

Love ZFS as a gamer. I took my gaming laptop with two ~500GB SATA SSDs, created a mirrored bpool, and then created a striped rpool. Of course, I recommend no one run this way, but it’s fast. Also, with built in compression, potential exemption of datasets from snapshots, and dataset level case sensitivity, I can create separate sets for flatpak, Steam, and Lutris that are fully under my control with increased operability of case-insensitive programs :) No idea how to use it on a server level, but as an insane home user, I love it.

[@wildmanjeff42]

love ZFS in FreeNas/FreeBSD. when BTRFS gets more reliable I will learn and use it. Thanks for the video W. :)

[@YouTuber-jz5nd]

I realize this video is 4 years old now, but I want to share my 2024 experiences with ZFS on my Fedora 40 desktop. I run a redundant ZFS Mirror on root and 4 SATA SSDs (Crucial MX500 4TB) in a Zpool with my data. While transferring data from my nvme root mirror to my SATA SSD pool, I easily get 1.3 - 1.5GB/sec transfer speed. Small files are finished before my computer tells me the transfer has started. It is ridiculously fast. Same thing to my TrueNAS device over my 10G home network. Insane transfer speeds with ZFS at both ends.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

12:29 It’s a *proprietary* computer on a card. And an inflexible one at that. Which is why I try to avoid hardware RAID.

[@mrlithium69]

This may be the only logical thing you've said. This argues for using ZFS instead of hardware RAID. Since ZFS is open source now.

[@temp50]

22:30 You can always se the "copies" property to e.g. 2. By doing so you're telling the filesystem that it should store every file within the given dataset 2 times, on 2 different physical location on the disk. So if one of them is on a location with full of bad sectors, the fs will still be able to retrieve the file from the other location.

While other people go for 19:9 video aspect for phone users, you are going the other direction (1.66:1). Just shows how special this channel is :)

[@robertpearson8546]

Checksums give you 1 bit of information - whether or not there is an error somewhere. Error-correcting codes tell you where the error is. With binary data, when you know where the error is, you can invert it - therefore removing the error.

[@denvera1g1]

I have a 12 bay ZFS file server appliance, and i have experienced bit rot, but thanks to ZFS Z3 i have never actually suffered a problem do to it, and it fixed the problem, if i get more than one on a drive, I'll do a scrub to make sure no other drives have corruptions, then swap the drive with a replacement

[@ultraali453]

Thank you for the excellent video. I am considering switching from Windows 11 to TrueNAS for my home file backup server.

[@rogernevez5187]

17:55 *Hard drive can be a silent carrier: ASYMPTOMATIC !!!!* LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLO +1

[@dineauxjones]

In a round about way ZFS was a pioneer in software defined storage where managing storage at a low level went from hardware to software. You now see the same principles applied in many other applications and technologies like HCI for instance.

[@jeremymcguire7069]

I used to go to a swap meet in CA with my dad on weekends where he would buy things like 8" floppy drives and huge 68000 cpu-based servers that were basically rescued from a landfill. Two or three weekends later he would triumphantly show me a working command line on an amber monochrome monitor. I miss my dad.

[@hacked2123]

Ha! I did the raid 5 recovery last week, that was fun.

[@thatLion01]

Any hope for more enterprise KZbin videos?

[@pD5V0DdsaoVhq]

Great video ofc, but would love to have a similar video about btrfs

[@Voltechs]

Excellent overview! Thanks :)

[@SciPunk215]

Good stuff Wendell !

[@asdf51501]

Here I am almost a year later watching this video. Why? I bought a QNap NAS to play with, and I'll eventually buy another one to back up to. Thank you once again Wendell for putting out these, and I'm now subbed to this channel in addition to the L1T channel. :)

[@jairunet]

I wonder where can I find the document 9:18 you showed about the ZFS details from jrssystemnet, I looked for it and could not find it 🤔

[@LethalBB]

"Brief" 31:49 Wendell!

[@anb1142]

TLDR: Basic Raid: If a file corrupts, even when there is a non corrupted file on a another drive, you can't get it (unless you send the drives to recovery) ZFS: automatically gets the non corrupted file from the mirror device Also ZFS hasn't caught upto NVME yet (@24:22), to be fair RAID is an array of *"Inexpensive"* drives

[@wbwarren57]

Taciturn is the perfect word to describe the speaker in this video! We are all wondering, when will he come out of his shell and speak more at length?

[@tensevo]

Great insights. Have you done vid on how long solid state storage lasts versus hard drive (spinning rust)?

[@thebeasts2826]

"Well, that machine caught on fire-" Me: **LP0 ON FIRE!**

[@arete_]

Pro tip: you don't need the music in the background. If you really feel you need it use it for cut scenes in between segments instead 😀

[@nikolai1790]

This is perfect thank you, definitely will educate others with this video haha

[@yingste]

Cool, that corrupted picture you used was of an FRC competition from 2015 if I remember correctly. Winnovation was one of our regional teams when I was in high school.

[@JordanLOL]

Great video. Thank you

[@LampJustin]

Thanks Wendell, great as always! If possible I'd like to see a LVM deep dive as I'm not yet understanding it totally. I always thought LVM would be unnecessary but with what you now said, it makes much more sense now. Also have you or anyone else tried out a recent version of bcachefs?

[@amessman]

Makes me proud to have had an X4150 back in middle school :P

[@mrmuds8624]

Fountain of knowledge as always. Great explanation Mr Wendell. Not that I understood much of it :-)

[@redneckrestoration9385]

Great stuff as always!

[@uncleslapslap]

Thanks. I like this format and appreciate your videos. I'd watch a 30min on XFS as well if you end up doing some other file systems! I've been running UNRAID servers for many years and would like to peek under the hood a bit more.

[@willofirony]

Well, now that I have absorbed the news that there is no data santa, I feel I should thank you for this new relationship with reality. Though life was so much cosier wallowing in my ignorance. Seriously, thank you.

[@sarf9069]

Brilliant vid thank you! I have a much better understanding of ZFS now! awsome :)

[@Mondulavuz]

Awesome video!

[@World_Theory]

It sounds like ZFS works best with a large number of slow storage drives. Could you use like … 48 micro SD cards with ZFS to create one really nice and reliable total storage area? (Not sure what the technical name for a combined virtual storage drive is. Is there a generic term, or does it change from file system to file system?) Actually, how would you use an silly number of micro SD cards as storage for a single computer?

[@benjaminsoans7335]

Thanks. That was brilliant!

[@xybersurfer]

22:11 can you recover data with ZFS, if you have a single disk with 2 ZFS partitions?

[@joelatkins5433]

Whoops. I thought I was already subscribed. I quite enjoy your personality.

[@romeo5006]

ZFS is cool, I have contact with Oracle Appliance with a shelf of 400 drives. A metadata server is required for its operation. Added to this is the HSM server and client. Greetings!

[@rhysperry111]

I got the basic idea, but I think I'm gonna need to try it practically to get it. Too bad I don't have a lot of drives to create a pool out of

[@choiceschoices5910]

OMG FINALLY, BEEN WAITING FOR THIS ALL MY LIFE, NOW PLS COMPARE IT WITH WHAT "OPEN MEDIA VAULT" USES, I NEED TO KNOW WHICH IS BETTER !!!!

[@williamp6800]

Open Media Vault uses EXT4 or NTFS. ZFS will protect your data better than either of those.

[@kuhluhOG]

What I am interested about is actually the development of bcachefs. It's built on top of bcache but (oversimplified) want to be a ZFS with the performance of an ext4. It's pretty young (with few developer(s)) and isn't mainlined, but can be mainlined into the Linux kernel, is actually stable (compared to btrfs) and a pretty "clean" (for a FS) codebase. Definitely something we should keep an eye on.

[@johnlocke9609]

I used ZFS for big pools for for than 7 years, with raid cards, but zfs was awesome, I did had a few problems and all where solved, even some bad IT guys messing with my big pools, couldn't make it fail hahaha! I did tried many things, for clusters, like GlusterFS and all the others you know. ZFS is THE best.

[@Huck9000]

I mentioned this on your other channel, but I've been watching your videos since you had your last channel, hiding behind your mic. Love your tutorial videos. You guys need to quit hammering old people over there. I've built two Freenas servers, a Linux system with GPU passthrough, a PFSense router and many other projects. I'm not as computer illiterate as Ryan's parents.

[@antik06]

I love ZFS on my QNAP NAS (I'm using QuTS hero) and everything related with it (ZFS cache processes, inline dedup, compression etc.). 💪👍

[@gorgonbert]

Fun fact: Sun Microsystems basically reimplemented NetApp‘s WAFL

[@gaborenyedi637]

There is error correction encoding at the driver level, so the driver can usually tell, if the data is corrupt. Of course, this may fail too, or just the electronics can fail, but it is not so simple for a drive to fail without notifying it.

[@thibaultmol]

Zfs vs btrfs objective comparison would be interesting as a follow up

[@davidg4512]

More zfs videos. Can you make a gluster plus zfs video? Or another scalable zfs solution

[@MJohnian]

Is MS server ReFS, microsofts version of ZFS? I am debating whether to switch from [MS Server 2019] to [TrueNas core or source] - it is simply for file server in Video Production? any recommendations?

[@zoomosis]

I'm interested in how the Windows port of ZFS turns out. Recently I've been tinkering with the next best thing (kind of) - exporting a ZFS ZVOL on FreeBSD as an iSCSI target and mounting it on a Windows PC. Effectively NTFS on top of ZFS. Surprisingly easy to set up, too.

[@LND3947]

Why would you place NTFS on top of ZFS? I'm asking out of interest, I am not questioning your decisions, I don't have a very good understanding of ZFS or Filesystem's. I hope this makes sense :) Thanks :)

[@GianfrancoGallizia]

@@LND3947 ZVOLs are a little different from ZFS datasets. A ZFS dataset is a dynamically allocated chunk of storage space with a mountpoint that the OS sees as a UNIX-like filesystem (inodes, users, groups, permissions, etc.) with some properties like "is the data compressed?" or "is the data deduplicated?". A ZVOL is like telling to ZFS "I need X amount of raw storage no strings attached" and then ZFS creates a new (virtual) device with X amount of storage space, but it's not formatted with ANY filesystem: the main use for this feature is to use these chunks of raw data as disk space for virtual machines, but nothing prevents you to set them as an iSCSI target. iSCSI is basically SCSI over Ethernet and Windows can access iSCSI targets (aka iSCSI data volumes) and see them as regular disks and so format them in NTFS.

[@Thunder-wd7ti]

Can you also do the same for btrfs? Do you recommend it for traditional desktop usage, opensuse uses btrfs as its default filesystem. What do you think about the compression feature of btrfs?

[@Kludgedean]

You know ZFS does compression too right? :)

[@Thunder-wd7ti]

@@Kludgedean now I do! That is cool!