In the lab, yes. Oracle killed my plans of adopting it.
I don't know where you got that. It's actually just the opposite. It checksums everything and includes several facilities to catch early corruption and address it before you ever lose data.
Yes, that is the idea. But it is based, as the article mentions, in ZFS uses atomic writes and barriers. So, how can you guarantee that? ZFS does it by writing data to the drive and making sure that the data actually has been written, how can ZFS be sure of that? It asks the drive. The problem is that consumer drives often lie and report that data has been written when it is currently only residing in the cache. And that's a great recipe for data corruption.
ZFS checksums are beyond awesome, but they don't combat this.
Jeff Bonwick explains it better than I could:
As you note, some disks flat-out lie: you issue the synchronize-cache command, they say "got it, boss", yet the data is still not on stable storage. Why do they do this? Because "it performs better". Well, duh -- you can make stuff really fast if it doesn't have to be correct.
Before I explain how ZFS can fix this, I need to get something off my chest: people who knowingly make such disks should be in federal prison. It is fraud to win benchmarks this way.
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2008-Octob...
I personally have pulled the power plug on 24 to 48 disk arrays, literally hundreds of times while under heavy load and have never once lost data.
I hope you don't use consumer drives or really do your research.
The same problem has bitten people running ZFS in a virtual machine, such as vmware ESX, that had similar problems where they couldn't trust the drive to behave as it was told, and corruption followed. Which kind of sucks when you don't have any means of repairing the damage.
Also, the replies I've gotten seems to imply that I have something against ZFS. I love ZFS but I see more potential in btrfs - but btrfs is many years away from even being worth considering an opponent to ZFS so that is kind of moot. All I want is a decent copy-on-write linux file system with cheap snapshots (and preferably good encryption support).