The Zettabyte File System Jeff Bonwick, Matt Ahrens, Val Henson, Mark Maybee, Mark Shellenbaum Jeff
[email protected] Abstract Today’s storage environment is radically different from that of the 1980s, yet many file systems In this paper we describe a new file system that continue to adhere to design decisions made when provides strong data integrity guarantees, simple 20 MB disks were considered big. Today, even a per- administration, and immense capacity. We show sonal computer can easily accommodate 2 terabytes that with a few changes to the traditional high-level of storage — that’s one ATA PCI card and eight file system architecture — including a redesign of 250 GB IDE disks, for a total cost of about $2500 the interface between the file system and volume (according to http://www.pricewatch.com) in late manager, pooled storage, a transactional copy-on- 2002 prices. Disk workloads have changed as a result write model, and self-validating checksums — we of aggressive caching of disk blocks in memory; since can eliminate many drawbacks of traditional file reads can be satisfied by the cache but writes must systems. We describe a general-purpose production- still go out to stable storage, write performance quality file system based on our new architecture, now dominates overall performance[8, 16]. These the Zettabyte File System (ZFS). Our new architec- are only two of the changes that have occurred ture reduces implementation complexity, allows new over the last few decades, but they alone warrant a performance improvements, and provides several reexamination of file system architecture from the useful new features almost as a side effect.