jorangreefNov 2023Strongly recommends
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
in “” · View on HN
ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems Part 1
ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems Part 1 on HackerTube: recommended by 4 Hacker News commenters across 4 separate months, 2016–2026.
Deirdré Straughan
Open on YouTubetalk · intermediate · evergreen
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.
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as the definitive explanation of ZFS design straight from its inventors, with war stories about data integrity.
- people recommended it
- 4
- separate months
- 4
- strong recommendations
- 3
- discussed on HN
- 2016–2026
“I would recommend anybody interested in filesystems to watch Jeff Bonwick (ZFS inventor) explain the design of ZFS”
What HN commenters said
6 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
throw0101aOct 2019Strongly recommends
> 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.
in “Ubuntu installer now supports ZFS on the boot partition” · View on HN
tnorgaardJun 2016Strongly recommends
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.
in “A ZFS developer’s analysis of Apple’s new APFS file system” · View on HN
solarengineerJan 2026Recommends
ZFS: The last word in File Systems: Part 1: ▶ this video Part 2: [link] ZFS In the trenches: [link] Some good stuff here: [link]
in “FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)” · View on HN
throw0101aApr 2021Cites it
> 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
in “Btrfs on Zoned Block Devices” · View on HN
throw0101aSep 2020Cites it
Well, ZFS isn't exactly monolithic if you look under the hood: it has the ZPL (files, directories), DMU (objects, transactions on those objects), SPA (actual disk I/O). A potato-quality video from 2008 with Moore and Bonwick, the creators (timestamped to relevant section): * ▶ this video
in “Preserving data integrity: A ZFS-inspired storage system” · View on HN