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ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems Part 1

Deirdré Straughan · talk · Watch on YouTube

Databases & storage

What it is

Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore, the creators of ZFS, present 'ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems' at the 2008 SNIA Software Developers' Conference. They explain the design, including copy-on-write, checksumming and avoiding the write hole.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN recommends it as the definitive explanation of ZFS design straight from its inventors, with war stories about data integrity.

  • 4 people recommended it
  • 4 different months
  • 3 strong recommendations
  • first 2016, last 2026

What HN commenters said

  1. “I would recommend anybody interested in filesystems to watch Jeff Bonwick (ZFS inventor) explain the design of ZFS”

    ZFS inventor explains design, with war stories on checksumming

    tnorgaard, 2016-06 · Strong recommendation · in “A ZFS developer’s analysis of Apple’s new APFS file system”

  2. “Watching Part 1 at least is worth it for anyone curious”

    Explains how different ZFS is from other filesystems

    throw0101a, 2019-10 · Strong recommendation · in “Ubuntu installer now supports ZFS on the boot partition”

  3. “I love this talk by Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore”

    Talk by ZFS creators that inspired TigerBeetle

    jorangreef, 2023-11 · Strong recommendation

  4. “Some good stuff here”

    ZFS talk series, listed among good resources

    solarengineer, 2026-01 · Recommendation · in “FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: zfs, file systems, copy-on-write, data integrity, jeff bonwick

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