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Comment by throwaway240403 | Hacker News Reader

QNAP unforgivably uses a proprietary version of ZFS with their own extensions that are not compatible with mainline OpenZFS. It can only zfs send/receive to other QNAP devices. While your data is protected like any other ZFS system, it is _NOT_ interoperable. You can not take a zpool out of a QNAP system and access it on another system with ZFS. I discovered this painfully the hard way, and won't buy from them again, unless I plan to wipe the software and run something open.

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I think the ZFS changes were due to needing a way to allow qnap systems to expand zfs pools. The raidz expansion features in openzfs probably took too long for qnap to wait.

OpenZFS released the zpool expansion as stable last year. Hopefully QNAP is charting a path to allow their users to migrate from their fork to OpenZFS, though of course these kinds of things take time to develop. I would be really worried if they are diverging further from OpenZFS rather than converging.

Last I looked at their releases of code, they had branched from ZFS before it became OpenZFS, and had a lot of proprietary extensions beyond just the reshaping (from memory, they implemented encryption differently, as one example, and I think they had one or two checksums that I assume were because something they shipped had hardware support for it?) so I wouldn't hold out hope that their goal is to rebase on OpenZFS unless they announce something to that effect.

Nah, I doubt they're going to rebase to openzfs. There's too much divergence and I don't see them putting the time to write something that converts their zfs format to openzfs without an extremely good reason.-

Ah so the fork is permanent. How unfortunate, guess I need to avoid QNAP software entirely.

> Hopefully QNAP is charting a path to allow their users to migrate from their fork to OpenZFS

This kind of migration is the stuff of nightmares. The main job of a NAS is to keep the data safe. A file system migration that works in every one of those corner cases present in the wild is statistically unlikely. The kind of bad publicity this can bring is what can sink a company. The only way I'd ever do this is by starting fresh on different storage and replicating the data.

I'll be snide and say it: "OpenZFS" and "stable" rarely belong in the same sentence (even though they seem to have a true 2.2 LTS these days).

There’s literally thousands of petabytes running on it in the wild, and it has continually proven to be one of, if not the most reliable filesystem, on the planet.

Joe blow running a beta release on his raspberry pi complaining about ram usage isn’t indicative of reality.

Amusingly, most of my old qnap hardware ran Ubuntu pretty well

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