When building your perfect NAS, there are several things to consider. After choosing the hardware and drives, you need to select an operating system for your storage server. Since most NAS operating systems don't support every file system imaginable, you'll need to do your research before choosing one.
However, if you are looking for a feature-rich file system that can handle most NAS workloads while protecting your valuable data from corruption, ZFS is clearly the best option currently.
5 Great self-healing powers
To keep corruption in check
Every time you transfer files to a ZFS pool, end-to-end checksums are created for the data and metadata. ZFS uses these checksums to check the data for errors. If corruption is detected, the file system attempts to repair the data using mirrored data sets.
In addition, ZFS also allows you to set up regular scrub tasks to verify the integrity of your stored data and prevent bit rot from corrupting your files. Combine this feature with some ECC memory and you have a solid storage solution that is extremely resilient to data corruption.
4 Solid compression, encryption and deduplication capabilities
For the latter, you need a good CPU and lots of RAM
If you have a lot of data to store on your NAS, ZFS offers a handful of compression algorithms that can help you save storage space. And if you're concerned about the confidentiality of your data, ZFS lets you encrypt important records to prevent unauthorized access to the files.
Then there's the deduplication feature, which removes redundant copies of the same data. I admit, this isn't for everyone, especially because it hogs VRAM like crazy. But if you're someone who has multiple copies of ISOs, movies, and other huge files stored all over your NAS, using the deduplication feature offered by ZFS can be beneficial.
3 Greater reliability
Trust me, snapshots can save you a lot of trouble
While the self-healing measures offered by ZFS are quite helpful, the combination of copy-on-write and snapshot makes this file system an excellent storage system for important data. Unlike journaling file systems, ZFS does not change the data stored in the blocks when you overwrite some files. Instead, it creates an entirely new block and modifies the metadata of the updated data to associate it with the newly created block.
ZFS also allows you to create snapshots, which contain information about the file system at a specific point in time. Don't get me wrong, you need more than just snapshots to back up your data. But the beauty of snapshots is that you can restore an older version if you accidentally overwrite or delete some files.
2 Decent performance
It offers an excellent balance between features and throughput
Before I talk about the performance of ZFS, there is no denying that it performs a bit worse than traditional file systems like EXT4 and XFS. But its performance is still pretty good, especially considering the additional reliability features that ZFS offers.
While the overall result depends on your specific workloads, ZFS is much faster than BTRFS. And that's before you add ZIL or L2ARC into the equation—and the difference becomes even greater when you're running a multi-drive setup in a RAID configuration.
1 Superior RAID support
Ideal for data collectors with entire drive racks
RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive, depending on what you believe) Drives, is an amazing setup that allows you to utilize multiple drives in striped, mirrored, parity, or hybrid setups. Of course, you can technically set up RAID on many file systems, but ZFS is one of the best options if you want to use complex RAID configurations on your NAS.
In addition to the traditional RAID types (commonly referred to as stripe and mirror), ZFS also allows you to set up RAID-Z storage pools. Certain ZFS-based operating systems, such as TrueNAS Scale, even take this to the next level by allowing you to configure drives in DRAID mode, which is more than you can do on a BTRFS file system.
ZFS may be difficult to learn, but it is an all-round file system for NAS users
Now that I've discussed the advantages of ZFS, it's time to discuss some of its disadvantages. Unlike BTRFS, you can't shrink the size of a ZFS partition, and replacing drives is a lot more of a hassle if you're running Zpools on your NAS. For most users (myself included), setting up ZFS on an existing Linux distribution is a bit more difficult than, say, using it in a specialized operating system like the TrueNAS series.
However, it is still my preferred file system for a NAS, mainly because it combines top-notch RAID support with the reliability of snapshots while offering decent performance under intensive workloads.