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Comment by omh | Hacker News Reader

As a Solaris admin, it's a little strange to hear ZFS called a "next-gen" filesystem. (It's been around for at least 7-8 years!) But it's good to see these ideas getting usable in other operating systems, especially with the current state of Solaris licensing.

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I think this is why there's a distinction between "new" and "next-gen". ZFS still has a lot of features and concepts that make most "current generation" file systems feel like toys.

I'm using HFS+. It's a last-last gen filesystem if ever there was one.

It's the only FS I've ever had silent corruption on, and it used to happen (10.4? 10.5? 10.6?) all the time.

I'd kill to have Apple just buy a license to NTFS.

Uh, you might want to look at NTFS performance for your given use case. If, say, you're a C++ programmer and your use case is reading lots of small files quickly and closing them again so you can compile, NTFS is a horror cabinet.

HFS beats that quite handily (and gets obliterated by ExtFS2 performance.)

At this point, I'd just like a filesystem I don't have to worry about. I never had a problem with NTFS.

So having slow compiles on NTFS is worse than having silent corruption on HFS?

Depends on the use case, no?

Would I want to store a lot of important write-once data on HFS? Reluctantly, if at all. High-throughput database? Yuck, no.

Would I trust it with a source-tree that is stored in a DVCS and immediately restorable, while also giving me much faster compiles? Yep.

Would I choose either FS for a server? Nope. That was the point - there is no single "best" file system, or the world would've long ago settled on it. Look at what you need it for, and make your decision accordingly.

Also, Docker vs Zones. Linux still has a way to go. :-)

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