John Paul Wohlscheid over at It's FOSS takes a look at the ZFS file system and its capabilities. He mainly covers OpenZFS which is the fork made since Oracle bought and shut down Solaris which was the original host of ZFS. It features pooled storage with RAID-like capabilities, copy-on-write with snapshots, data integrity verification and automatic repair, and it can handle files up to 16 exabytes in size, with file systems of up to 256 quadrillion zettabytes in size should you have enough electricity to pull that off. Because it started development under a deliberately incompatible license, ZFS cannot be directly integrated in Linux. However, several distros work around that and provide packages for it. It has been ported to FreeBSD since 2008.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday September 12 2018, @01:00PM (1 child)
Just wondering: How much RAM did you have on that BSD system using ZFS way back in 2008? Machines were a lot smaller then.
(Score: 2) by pendorbound on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:15PM
My 2008 dedupe near-disaster happened with 8GB of RAM (max the motherboard could handle...) for a 3TB pool (4x750GB, RAIDZ-1), SATA attached WD consumer class drives.
Two ebay surplus MB updates later and a ton of "pulled" DIMMs on the cheap, and I'm at 96GB for 43TB total storage across 4 pools and 18 spindles of various makes and models. Still no dedupe enabled though...