Zfs

[GreyGeek]

I saw a video by Sun around 2008-2010 which showed the ZFS files system tying together a large number of memory sticks, I don't recall how many or what their sizes were, but the resulting overall storage was 64GB. The two Sun technicians pulled one or two memory sticks at random from the setup and the ZFS continued to operate without loosing any data or performance. I was chomping at the bit waiting for ZFS to appear in stable form in a Linux distro. But, time passed, Btrfs showed up in Kubuntu and I adopted it, forgetting all about ZFS.

When installing PCBSD as a guestOS I noticed that it featured ZFS. My curiosity was aroused and I looked for a tutorial. I found one here.

I am going to play with it in PCBSD for a while. I looked into Kubuntu's repository and ZFS is there too, using FUSE.

And, for Ubuntu, here.

[GreyGeek]

Using ZFS in a virtual guest PCBS is not as easy as it appeared. Increasing the complexity is the fact that common utilities like fdisk, for example, do not behave the same way in PCBSD as they do in a Linux distro. Fdisk would not allow me to partition or format some VDI's I created to make my own zpool, and PCBSD's version of gpart wouldn't recognize /dev/adX's.

So, my curiosity satisfied, I deleted PCBSD. It's not one I'd recommend.

openSUSE, on the other hand, is an easy to use, well crafted, and beautiful distro. My only nit is that it does not use dpkg. But, I would use it in a heartbeat.