You've heard of FAT, FAT32, NTFS, Reiser, Ext ... well, ZFS is here ... and it is serious ...


Obviously, these blokes were doing some publicity stunts, they could have just pulled the mains, but the theory is quite sound. As someone who has worked on various systems over the years and done battle with hard drive array subsystems of all sorts of types, I was impressed last week when, on a Solaris 10 administration course, we were introduced to ZFS.

It has long been a problem for home users that protection of data has either been expensive, or flaky. The best solution I came across was actually in Windows which allowed for a reasonable RAID system to be set up. However, it was slow and suffered some issues, not least that you had problems if the system died and didn't have a recovery set of your configuration to hand. Also, upgrading was a nightmare.

The hardware RAID cards on offer were either proper equipment that cost a small fortune, or else cheap and nasty things that were near impossible to talk with to find out what had gone wrong, which drive needed replacing and then once you have replaced it, then get the system to accept the new drive and rebuilt it ... and even then the solution was only software on a chip anyway as opposed to being a dedicated hardware solution ... for crying out loud, there had to be a better way of doing this.

Well, now there is. This PDF on ZFS explains what was going on and how ZFS has solved the challenges. Now, even the need to fdisk (fsck) a drive system is gone.

I have some equipment on the way to me that will allow me to run some tests and show you how easy this thing is. Over the next few months I'll be planning and building a cheap but secure system using cheap components. If you know how to use Solaris, you'll get a kick out of this for sure.