How many of us are using single disks on our laptops? I have a NAS and use all of the above but that doesn’t help people with single drive systems. Or help me understand why I would want it on my laptop.
* If the hard drive / SSD corrupted blocks, the corruption would be identified.
* Ditto blocks allow for self healing. Usually, this only applies to metadata, but if you set copies=2, you can get this on data too. It is a poor man’s RAID.
* ARC made the desktop environment very responsive since unlike the LRU cache, ARC resists cold cache effects from transient IO workloads.
* Transparent compression allowed me to store more on the laptop than otherwise possible.
* Snapshots and rollback allowed me to do risky experiments and undo them as if nothing happened.
* Backups were easy via send/receive of snapshots.
* If the battery dies while you are doing things, you can boot without any damage to the filesystem.
For other stuff, let that nerdy CorpIT handle your system.
Also snapshots are great regardless.
Every ZFS block pointer has room for 3 disk addresses; by default, the extras are used only for redundant metadata, but they can also be used for user data.
When you turn on ditto blocks for data (zfs set copies=2 rpool/foo), zfs can fix corruption even on single-drive systems at the cost of using double or triple the space. Note that (like compression), this only affects blocks written after the setting is in place, but (if you can pause writes to the filesystem) you can use zfs send|zfs recv to rewrite all blocks to ensure all blocks are redundant.