Hello,
I have read much about ZFS and I find it great, especially the checksums against
silent data corruption and the COW writing policy and the snapshots and of
course the storage pooling.
But there are some points I have problems with:
- What happens to the pools if the machine is shut down and rebooted? Are the
pools automatically exported and imported again on boot up? Where is the
information about the pools kept? What component is responsible for automatic
export/import?
- There seem to be a lack of tools or options for recovering when ZFS refuses to
import a pool for some reason. I have seen many forum posts about problems of
that kind. I''m worried about that. Perhaps it might also be a good idea
if you could force ZFS to forget about a device and to deal with the remaining
disks. I think it should be always possible to access the data which lies on
fully functional disks. Wasn''t it also a feature of ZFS that it can be
used even when parts of the metadata are missing or broken?
- What about data wiping? Simply overriding does not work because of the COW
policy. So how can it be achieved? I think it should be considered to integrate
some mechanism to intentionally override data.
- I think ZFS needs more flexibility in vdev management. It bothers me that you
cannot remove a disk from a (non-mirror) pool although there is enough space to
migrate the data stripes. Well, I heared that this feature is planned for the
future.
- A flexible encryption support would also be great. (I know that it is
planned.)
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