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    ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems Part 1

    Deirdré Straughan

    4 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2016–2026

    YouTube

    1:01:27 · 19K views · Jun 12, 2012

    Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore, the creators of ZFS, present 'ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems' at the 2008 SNIA Software Developers' Conference. They explain the design, including copy-on-write, checksumming and avoiding the write hole.

    HN recommends it as the definitive explanation of ZFS design straight from its inventors, with war stories about data integrity.

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    6 comments from Hacker News

    1. @throw0101aOct 2019· in “Ubuntu installer now supports ZFS on the boot partition”

      > Is ZFS any good? The presentation "ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems" from its debut in 2008 is a good introduction. Part 1 (of 3) probably best explains how different it is from just about anything else out there (even now, in 2019): * this video Part 2 show some extra niceties / features, and Part 3 is a demo and Q&A. Watching Part 1 at least is worth it for anyone curious; 2 and 3 are optional.

      Strongly recommendsView on HN
    2. @tnorgaardJun 2016· in “A ZFS developer’s analysis of Apple’s new APFS file system”

      I would recommend anybody interested in filesystems to watch Jeff Bonwick (ZFS inventor) explain the design of ZFS: this video . They have a few very nice war stories explaining why they found it useful to have the user data checksummed as well.

      Strongly recommendsView on HN
    3. @jorangreefNov 2023

      ZFS was an inspiration for TigerBeetle. I love this talk by Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore: “ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems” this video

      Strongly recommendsView on HN
    4. @solarengineerJan 2026· in “FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)”

      ZFS: The last word in File Systems: Part 1: this video Part 2: [LINK] ZFS In the trenches: [LINK] Some good stuff here: [LINK]

      RecommendsView on HN
    5. @throw0101aApr 2021· in “Btrfs on Zoned Block Devices”

      > initial issues You mean like the current advice not to use anything except mirroring and striping (RAID-0/1/10)? > Parity may be inconsistent after a crash (the "write hole"). The problem born when after "an unclean shutdown" a disk failure happens. But these are two distinct failures. These together break the BTRFS raid5 redundancy. If you run a scrub process after "an unclean shutdown" (with no disk failure in between) those data which match their checksum can still be read out while the mismatched data are lost forever. * [LINK] I've been using ZFS since it came out on Solaris 10 over a decade ago and it was specifically designed not to have a write hole due to its COW/ACID nature. See this 2008 SNIA presentation from Bonwick and Moore, the creators of ZFS talking about not having a write hole: * ACID/COW: this video * Integrity: this video

      CitesView on HN