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Comment by stephencanon | Hacker News Reader

What ZFS features do you want that APFS won't/can't provide? Is there some other reason you want ZFS instead?

APFS can't provide the stability that ZFS does because it hasn't been beaten on for long enough yet. I have a hard time trusting a new filesystem to store anything remotely important until its been beaten on long enough to find many of the nasty pathologies. Features don't matter as much as stability. Keeping your data safe is the #1 thing a filesystem needs to do.

Also, based on how the quality of the OS has been in the last few versions, I'm not sure I entirely want to trust brand new software from apple right now. In my opinion, they don't take bugs seriously enough, and a filesystem is a hell of a lot more complicated and important than a music player, web browser, or email client.

The engineers who work on filesystems are not the engineers who work on music, mail, etc. Apple has been doing a lot of stuff under the covers with their filesystems, and it's all been rock solid so far, so I don't see any reason to start doubting them now.

Because ZFS is deployed on consumer hardware of hundreds of millions of people? No, zfs is instead used on ecc equipped servers in carefully managed environments.

On a very high level ZFS main thing compared to APFS is currently data integrity features such as checksums of the data to detect bit rot (silent corruption) and the ability to automatically heal the data (with enough redundancy in place).

It would be good to at least have the checksum capability in place to make one aware of bit rot silently destroying data. Hopefully there has been some improvements to the capabilities since the announcement last year.

Does bit rot actually happen on regular computers? I thought it took years and it was mostly a danger for huge external hard drives.

I'd rather have better SSD performance. I just personally never lost any data because I let it sit for too long.

Yes, bit rot happens all the time. Normally the drive its self catches and repairs these errors, but sometimes they slip through and become the filesystems problem. It doesn't really happen super often, but the fact that it happens at all mandates that filesystems that care about data integrity handle it.

Or they could just add more error correction bits to the flash storage in the phone, if this really were a problem.

Got it.

Thanks for explaining.

The data integrity features of apfs are fairly weak compared to zfs. zfs also does much more interesting things with multidisk management, though those features are less critical on the desktop

ZFS's killer feature: checksums

Aside from what other said: compatibility with others OSs. But that's probably not very high on Apple's agenda (at least not for an FS).

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