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Comment by jhugg | Hacker News Reader

Seems like running on SSD/NVRAM may call for some new thinking. Running on watches may be even secondary to that.

Not that ZFS won’t run well on SSD, but it feels like there’s a gulf between filesystems designed with SSDs in mind and those designed with spindles in mind.

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It seems that COW filesystems in general are better for use with SSDs... iirc, SSDs themselves do similar things as part of their wear leveling algorithms anyway. It seems to me that it's time to break some of this down. With solid state storage reaching levels close to RAM in terms of latency, I think eventually they'll come together, and that's where it will get really interesting.

On the flip side, with spinning storage approaching 10tb drives, the need for enhanced filesystems for RAID arrays with those beasts are needed as well.

In general, we really need some patent releases from those companies strangling filesystem advancements (namely Oracle and MS).

Out of curioisity, how do you feel that Oracle is strangling filesystem advancement?

Encryption is a big one that's been annoying everyone. Oracle baked encryption into their own ZFS implementation ages ago, but not in a way that works with the open source variety. Years later, we're only just now starting to see some solutions for this.

I'd like to see something comparable to btrfs/zfs but designed for plain nand flash. Less opaque layers to guess your way around. UBIFS?

If I remember one talk correctly ZFS was designed with persistent memory in mind, so I don't think SSDs are far out of their design thoughts.

[edit: it was a BSD Now episode]

Definitely not. ZFS was primarily focused on spinning disks. Take for example the fact that the project discarded block indirection early on: the resulting random reads would be basically fine on SSDs and debilitating on HDDs. Ditto TRIM which is still not (IMO) fully baked in ZFS.

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