I really don't understand the insane hype around ZFS. You can't read any thread that touches on filesystems without the ZFS zealots coming out.
I had been wanting to try ZFS on my home NAS for a while (for snapshotting/redundancy/data integrity) and finally got enough disks that it made sense. I wasn't looking forward to learning what I presumed to be a very complicated system though. About 15 minutes into my research for setting up and maintaining a ZFS filesystem and I just went - wait thats it? So incredibly simple and well documented, it has been a joy to use. It is very rarely that complicated operations on complicated systems use such simple and easy to understand commands. It just does what I expect!
Examples: ZFS snapshots can be recursive (-r) or not, whereas on btrfs they cannot be recursive; in discussions I've seen, this is mentioned as "a feature", since you can create a subvolume for data that you don't want to be part of the snapshot, but it also prevents you from dividing up a logical heirarchy into multiple behaviours (compression vs. not, block size, etc.).
Bind mounts can get around most of the limitations here, at the cost of polluting one directory with the canonical locations of all your special-purpose subvolumes. I think it's still awkward to simultaneously snapshot every subvolume that is mounted under a particular tree for incremental backup purposes.
I've personally waited for BTRFS longer than a decade but my use-cases are yet to be considered stable (not something you really mess with in regard to filesystems).
Honestly, as sure as I have been on the success of BTRFS I now consider BTRFS dead on arrival - if it will ever even arrive. The pace of development is slower than the universe around it, that might be too harsh but really - no RAID6 yet? A decade ago the impression I got was "soon". And now 2-drive parity is becoming obsolete.
ZFS has tons of warts for home-use, I agree. So, for a home-user with high demands I don't see anything exciting in the future.
Re obsolete, are you referring to RAID1C3?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-20...
I'd much prefer something like raidz3 compared to the authors setup.
RAID1C3 is nice but very expensive for use in bulk storage at home.
No way to rebalance a pool. Also increasing a pool always results in less reliability (in terms of drive losses that results in the whole pool going down).
No proper recovery tools if something goes wrong.
Then the lack of flexibility talked about in the article. This means the up-front cost and total cost is vastly more than a more typical setup where you can buy drives spread out over many years and take advantage of falling prices, less power consumption and noise (in part because you typically start such an array with higher density drives, since the low cost and longevity allows you to).
Probably forgot some other reasons.
That said I still use zfs (freenas) at home. But because of the above it is quite hard to blindly recommend it.
My experience is that it's pretty good. The tooling does what it says without a lot of drama. I can scrub while the system is in use and don't notice it mostly. I have seen some small corruptions that it was able to flag for me with specific filenames and fix. Snapshotting and send/receive is also very handy.
I heard some people say they don't like to use it under heavy load. That seems reasonable to me. You're paying costs to get the integrity piece. So it's not for every use or every user. It is very good at what it does, however.
I switched to it after the 7200.11 firmware mess, where the drives reported successful writes but didnt write anything. ZFS would have caught that, my Adaptec card certainly couldnt have and didnt.
ZFS to the rescue again a while later when those (now firmware updated) 7200.11 drives started dropping after 15k hours of service. ZFS saved my data when two drives started failing in my RAID5 set at the same time.
All the weird minor problems that would cause random issues or performance issues for other file systems like flaky SATA cables, intermittent HBA/backplane ports, etc. ZFS catches them all and informs you.
Having been hit by bit rot, corrupted files, corrupted file systems, etc etc before switching, ZFS is fantastic. And there is something great about watching it scrub at >1GB/sec, verifying every single bit of your data.
a situation in which something is advertised and discussed in newspapers, on television, etc. a lot in order to attract everyone's interest:
May be its just me because Morden day usage of "hype" seems to involve and implies a negative meaning, especially in tech. Similar to false advertising. And no one was actively promoting ZFS, they were only very "responsive".
And then zealots, I had to reread 226 comments, ran to Cambridge dictionary
a person who has very strong opinions about something, and tries to make other people have them too
I dont see anyone having strong opinions and force others to have the same. If anything a lot of people are showing not because the love ZFS, but they have been burnt by btrfs.
Agreed 100%. That's particularly annoying to us desktop users. It took me years to figure out that no, FreeBSD aside, it doesn't bring anything to the table outside of enterprise storage use cases. At least it doesn't bring anything that's worth the hassles (I don't have to export ntfs filesystems before using them on another computer; same for ext4 -and then there's performance).