5 reasons you should use ZFS for your NAS

When you’re assembling your perfect NAS, there are several things you’ll need to consider. Once you’ve chosen the hardware and drives, you’ll have to pick an operating system for your storage server. Since most NAS OS don’t support every file system under the sun, you’ll have to do your research before you zero in on one.

But if you’re looking for a feature-laden file system that can handle most NAS workloads while keeping your precious data safe from corruption, ZFS is easily the best option right now.

5 Great self-healing provisions

To keep corruption at bay

Every time you transfer files to a ZFS pool, it creates end-to-end checksums for both the data and metadata. ZFS utilizes these checksums to check for errors in the data, and if corruption is detected, the file system tries to repair the data with the help of mirrored datasets.

What’s more, ZFS also lets you set up periodic scrub tasks to check the integrity of your stored data and prevent bit rot from damaging your files. Pair this feature with some ECC memory, and you have a solid storage solution that’s highly resistant to data corruption.

4 Solid compression, encryption, and deduplication facilities

You’ll need a good CPU and plenty of RAM for the last one

If you have tons of data that you need to store on your NAS, ZFS provides a handful of compression algorithms to help you save disk space. Meanwhile, for those anxious about the confidentiality of their data, ZFS lets you encrypt important datasets to prevent unauthorized access to your files.

Then there’s the deduplication feature that removes redundant copies of the same data. I’ll admit, it’s not for everyone, especially since it tends to hog VRAM like crazy. But if you’re someone who has multiple copies of ISOs, movies, and other huge files stored all over your NAS, there might be some benefit to using the dedupe functionality offered by ZFS.

3 Better reliability

Trust me, snapshots can save you a lot of pain

While the self-healing measures offered by ZFS are pretty helpful, the copy-on-write and snapshot combo makes this file system amazing for storing important data. Unlike journaling file systems, ZFS doesn’t modify the data stored in the blocks when you overwrite some files. Instead, it creates an entirely new block and modifies the metadata of the updated data to link to the newly created block.

ZFS also lets you take snapshots, which contain information about the file system at a specific point in time. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll need more than just snapshots to back up your data. But the neat aspect of snapshots is that you can reload to an older version if you accidentally overwrite or delete some files.

2 Decent performance

It provides a great balance between features and throughput

Before I talk about ZFS’ performance, there’s no denying that it performs slightly worse than conventional file systems such as EXT4 and XFS. But its performance is still pretty decent, especially when you consider the extra reliability features provided by ZFS.

While the overall result depends on your specific workloads, ZFS is a lot faster than BTRFS. That’s before you add ZIL or L2ARC to the equation – and the difference grows even larger if you’re running a multi-drive setup in a RAID configuration.

1 Superior RAID support

Ideal for data hoarders with entire racks of drives

RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive, depending on what you believe) Drives, is an amazing facility that lets you leverage multiple drives in striped, mirrored, parity, or hybrid setups. Sure, you can technically set up RAID on many file systems, but ZFS is one of the best options if you’re planning to use complex RAID configurations on your NAS.

Besides the conventional RAID types (which are often called Stripe and Mirror), ZFS also lets you set up RAID-Z storage pools. Heck, certain ZFS-based operating systems like TrueNAS Scale take this to the next level by allowing you to configure drives in DRAID modes, which is more than what you can do on a BTRFS file system.

ZFS may be difficult to learn, but it’s an all-rounder file system for NAS users

Now that I’ve discussed the pros of ZFS, it’s time to go over some of its drawbacks. Unlike BTRFS, you can’t shrink the size of a ZFS partition, and replacing drives involves a lot more pain if you’re running Zpools on your NAS. For most users (including myself), ZFS is a bit trickier to set up on top of an existing Linux distro compared to, say, using it in a specialized OS like the TrueNAS series.

That said, it’s still my favorite file system for a NAS, mostly because it combines top-tier RAID support with the reliability of snapshots, all while providing decent performance in intensive workloads.