I suspect (but I have no data!) that the majority of times that users have file system corruption and need to run fsck is due to bad software behaviour, and not failing disks.
If you have a bad software write, ZFS should be able to detect that in the same way it would a hardware error since the checksums won't match. Also worth noting that the checksums are themselves checksummed in a merkle tree. It also has a tool called "scrub" which can check data integrity without unmounting the disk.
Of course if your filesystem has buggy code for checksumming/repair then you are boned whatever.
One thing to keep in mind is that ZFS is more complex than your typical filesystem, but it's also one of the few filesystems that's effectively a cryptographically self-validating tree. You're a lot more likely to have a disk lie to you than ZFS flake out.
Yes ZFS is quite resilient against corruption but when it bites, which has happened plenty of times in the past, you are truly screwed.
The philosophy behind ZFS and file system recovery has always been that it is too inconvenient. It is much better to restore from tape backups so why make any effort on recovery?
Thing is, most consumers don't have tape backups...
Because of that, ZFS is in the very vast majority of cases a bad choice for home users, especially under linux where it can hardly be considered mature.
BRTFS just isn't ready yet.
As a home user you can't even get a decent COW FS with decent snapshotting or checksums. That is the sad state we are in and will be in for many years to come.
Most data on consumer's computers is 1 disk failure away from loss anyway, hence the popularity of cloud syncing services.
I've been using ZFS for years now, i've had disks go bad, I've replaced them. ZFS has protected me from data loss better than anything else. In the past when I've had the disk lie to me, ZFS was able to tell me what files were corrupted and thus had invalid data.
I'm going to need to throw a [citation needed] on your post.
http://www.osnews.com/story/22423/Should_ZFS_Have_a_fsck_Too...
UFS, ext3, ext4 would have continued on giving me bad data back. Are there going to be cases whereby a file system fails completely? Yes, but writing tools to attempt to fix those issues that happen once in a million times is almost impossible because of the difficulty of replicating those failure scenarios and then writing code to deal with the disks having that corruption.
I still trust ZFS with more data than any other file system.
I'm getting "we need an fsck that does magic" vibes here.
Actually the whole point of RAID is to combat a MISSING drive, not a corrupt drive. Parity works when I'm lacking one bit ... not when any of my bits might be lying.
Half of the reason of ZFS is to protect against the scenarios when a drive's internal checksum should catch a data error - but the drives returns bogus data and says 'oh its good'. RAID5 can't catch that(mathematically impossible) ... RAID6 can but most implementations don't check because its expensive(extra IO and calcs)
This is the reason most of your high end SAN vendors don't just deploy RAID5/6/10 but also checksum the data themselves under the covers. They don't trust even high end SAS/FC drives.