81 engineers on Hacker News describe using ZFS first-hand: 37 endorse it, 9 regret it, 7 are mixed.
“We were using ZFS in prod a few years ago, and there was a one-line patch to fix data loss issues.”
mixed · production · hedora · 2026-11-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“afaik it's about as safe as they come (and I've been using it in prod since solaris 10)”
endorse · production · cyberpunk · 2026-09-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Now that I've been using ZFS with automatic snapshots, I feel hamstrung working on any Linux system just using ext4”
endorse · personal · nirvdrum · 2025-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In the end we didn't move to S3 we stayed with good old ZFS storage.”
endorse · production · selfhoster1312 · 2025-09-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'll never use ZFS in production after I was on a team that used it at petabyte scale. It's too complex”
regret · production · klysm · 2024-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“ZFS for /home for snapshots and transparent compression now, all on top of LVM”
endorse · personal · greenavocado · 2024-07-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I switched to this after years of running on ZFS, and for my workloads btrfs is faster on Linux (not to mention the licensing/packaging mess).”
regret · personal · antongribok · 2024-02-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I use filesystems for very high performance applications, and I've found ZFS to often be the limiting factor”
regret · production · csdvrx · 2024-01-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“These days I run a 250TB ZFS pool as my "main" pool”
endorse · personal · phil21 · 2024-01-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have to manually check the zpool periodically to see if there are faults.”
mixed · personal · gosub100 · 2023-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We also serve VM storage from a pair of Illumos ZFS boxes over iSCSI.”
endorse · production · Enderboi · 2023-07-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I think I kind of feel more comfortable having borg as a second technology in the system, too, so that my restore can't be broken by a ZoL bug.”
mixed · personal · gorgoiler · 2022-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We backup our data storage for an entire HPC cluster, about 2 PiB of it to a single machine with a 4 disk shelves running ZFS with snapshots. It works very well.”
endorse · production · reacharavindh · 2022-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I went with zfs on Debian over unraid, freenas, or omv for my current server.”
endorse · personal · zeagle · 2022-04-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Years of running ZFS teach you that bits flip, a lot... and you have no realistic recourse without block level checksums.”
endorse · personal · insaneirish · 2022-02-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using ZFS in production for so long and its been so stable”
endorse · production · thghtihadanacct · 2021-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“ZFS. Complete research companies unknowingly depend on the utmost reliability and flexibility ZFS has to offer.”
endorse · production · 10 yr · Datagenerator · 2021-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I used to use hardware RAID pre-ZFS but have never again after switching to ZFS when Solaris 10 first included it.”
endorse · production · 15 yr · jjav · 2021-06-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using ZFS for a few years now and it's just been amazing.”
endorse · personal · 3 yr · joekrill · 2020-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We all sleep quite well with this arrangement and have since we first migrated from UFS2 to ZFS in 2012.”
endorse · production · 8 yr · rsync · 2020-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I use ZFS on Freebsd where the same is true... zfs send and receive just work.”
endorse · personal · benlivengood · 2020-11-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using ZFS in production both in my home and at work since 2012. ... it's obviously the best choice for a home built filer”
endorse · production · 8 yr · tristor · 2020-11-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched our staging databases to be on ZFS and saw inexplicable, very noticeable decreases in performance.”
regret · production · coderintherye · 2020-02-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Due to ZFS snapshots and the power of zfs send/recv, I expect this system installation to last for years to come.”
endorse · personal · npx · 2019-11-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've had plenty of disk failures which ZFS detected well before SMART did because we run monthly scrubs for our ZFS pools”
mixed · production · nilsb · 2019-09-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I had not great experiences with ZFS on Linux. Like broken for a month on a standard distros kernel type issues.”
regret · production · ratling · 2019-03-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run ZFS on our EC2 instances which compresses our data by 2x. By compressing our data, we get a major cost saving”
endorse · production · malisper · 2018-09-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“its easy for us to make consistent backups with ZFS snapshots.”
endorse · production · sethhochberg · 2018-09-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“every time we've observed it as unstable in production. We saw great performance gains as well, but under several real world workloads it repeatedly crashed.”
regret · production · craigkerstiens · 2017-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run a number of ZoL (ZFS on Linux) filers in various backup/archival roles, and the cost savings and flexibility are great.”
mixed · production · phil21 · 2017-11-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run ZFS with the ZIL/Cache on the NVMe. The storage performance is great, but CPU isn't overly generous.”
endorse · production · BrianT · 2017-09-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We originally ran OpenSolaris _just for ZFS_.”
endorse · production · ComputerGuru · 2017-08-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“This is how I run my home fileserver. It is also how I/we run all of rsync.net - ZFS filesystems on top of plain old FreeBSD.”
endorse · production · rsync · 2017-07-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“which has, incidentally, only happened to me _ONCE_ in ~8 years of zfs in prod”
endorse · production · 8 yr · cyberpunk · 2017-04-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“So we switched to ZFS, ran weekly scrubs - only replaced disks that didn't survived the srub in reasonable time”
endorse · personal · nisa · 2017-03-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've used ZFS in prod for 8 years at least ... and it's never caused me any of the problems that things like VXFS, various sans, drbd etc have”
endorse · production · 8 yr · cyberpunk · 2017-03-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Yes, we've run into 2 or 3 ZFS bugs that I can think of that were resolved in a timely fashion”
endorse · production · lscotte · 2016-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We have been running ZFS on Linux in production since April 2015 on over 1500 instances in AWS EC2”
endorse · production · 1.7 yr · tnorgaard · 2016-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It's maturing rapidly and has proven to be very stable so far. ... we have been using it to do RAID0 striping of ephemeral drives for a year or two on a number of workloads.”
endorse · production · 2 yr · lscotte · 2016-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've actually been running it in production at Netflix for a few microservices for over a year... ZFS has worked well on Linux for us.”
endorse · production · 1 yr · brendangregg · 2016-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have messed with ZFS on Linux on Ubuntu and I have to say that I would not yet trust it in production.”
regret · personal · devoply · 2016-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“ZFS ran mostly fine and scrubs kept the metadata sane. Never had data loss”
endorse · production · nisa · 2016-08-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run ZFS at my company, Datto, across hundreds of machines... It has a few warts, but overall very stable”
mixed · production · wspeirs · 2016-07-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been running ZFS in prod since 2008 (on Solaris).”
mixed · production · 8 yr · rodgerd · 2016-06-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run ZFS as a backend for Postgres all over our public cloud ... and we have not seen any ZFS-related performance issues.”
endorse · production · bcantrill · 2015-01-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've had slowness... we were running on zfs and then later brtfs... eventually writes were slowed leading to long lock times”
regret · production · bhouston · 2014-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run ZFS on our network and all the secretaries have to do their doc/excel work on the drive. Use ZFS and make read only snapshots”
endorse · production · susi22 · 2013-10-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“So please, take it from someone with a decade of production experience with ZFS”
endorse · production · 10 yr · bcantrill · 2013-03-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“zfsonlinux.org has been reliable for me on a CentOS 6 dev box.”
endorse · personal · bsg75 · 2012-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“When we used it in production about 5 years ago it was not so rock-solid. We had to bring in Sun-Support and went through some nasty downtimes for lengthy resilvering.”
regret · production · moe · 2012-08-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“ZFS is absolutely the way to go.”
endorse · personal · filmgirlcw · 2012-06-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'd rather use ZFS than worry about RAID bitrot/etc.”
endorse · personal · seltzered_ · 2011-11-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I can personally vouch for the stability of ZFS and FreeBSD 8.x. I've been running it in production for years”
endorse · production · sgt · 2010-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“my most important data lives on a RAID system (ZFS) on a Xeon with ECC RAM”
neutral · personal · TacticalCoder · 2026-07-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run proxmox on a bunch of hardware servers, but for "homelab" we use Ubuntu on ZFS + Incus cluster.”
neutral · personal · k_bx · 2025-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run ZFS for a system at work on linux.”
neutral · production · tcmart14 · 2025-11-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run the latest stable/release ZoL codebase which includes bona fide encrypted ZFS datasets where you hold the key”
neutral · production · rsync · 2022-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the import process would run in production on a server with low average load, 256GB RAM, and ZFS with zstd compression.”
neutral · production · mastax · 2022-11-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run the latest stable/production ZoL code for these accounts.”
neutral · production · rsync · 2022-09-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Customers each get a local ZFS dataset and a separate blob storage container.”
neutral · production · greggyb · 2022-07-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run ZFS and KVM, so moving a VM around is easy.”
neutral · production · mgbmtl · 2021-11-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“7PB on ZFS in production here. No vendor support, FreeBSD with send/receive pairs to another 7PB location”
neutral · production · Datagenerator · 2021-11-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've run FreeBSD ZFS for about a decade”
neutral · personal · 10 yr · anotherhue · 2021-07-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Recently started running Docker+ZFS in prod, haven't seen it break yet but appreciate heads up”
neutral · production · yjftsjthsd-h · 2021-07-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run 10 baremetal servers in CA and EU, using KVM, ZFS and "fallback IPs"”
neutral · production · mgbmtl · 2021-07-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we had a 24 disk zfs storage server built using these disks”
neutral · production · atkbrah · 2021-06-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we migrated back to FreeBSD and ZFS shortly after that experience.”
neutral · production · Volundr · 2020-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it's hard for me to say I regret the choice to pass it up and stick to combinations of ZFS, rsync, and the trusty old tarball.”
neutral · personal · cookiecaper · 2019-11-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In my case, there are a lot of places where we use disparately multitiered storage on freenas/zfs/filesystem”
neutral · production · late2part · 2018-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I recently built a FreeBSD/ZFS based server and chose a cheaper CPU”
neutral · production · reacharavindh · 2018-10-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have used LXD (with ZFS storage) in production”
neutral · production · yupyup · 2017-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run Kafka (and I believe Cassandra) on top of Centos/ZFS in AWS”
neutral · production · vlahmot · 2016-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use JBOD and ZFS on the storage nodes; the LSI 9300-8i.”
neutral · production · avifreedman · 2016-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we have a 40 vanilla PostgreSQL instances running on ZFS on Linux and a single Citus master node.”
neutral · production · malisper · 2016-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“as we run on ZFS and have daily/weekly snapshots enabled by default”
neutral · production · rsync · 2015-03-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we consolidated 4 Backup PC servers down to one with ZFS holding the same data”
neutral · production · linsomniac · 2015-03-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run ZFS -- specifically, OpenZFS -- in production across all of our datacenters”
neutral · production · bcantrill · 2015-01-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“even ZFS couldn't cope with read errors anymore”
neutral · personal · nisa · 2014-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using OpenSolaris derived distributions for a while for ZFS”
neutral · personal · insaneirish · 2013-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“ZFS deployment occurs in May, 2012”
neutral · production · kozubik · 2012-04-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?