We are excited to release new features in Storage for Windows Server 2022. Our focus is to provide customers with greater resiliency, performance, and flexibility. While some of these topics have bee...
Updated Sep 03, 2021
Version 2.0
Blog Post
Thanks AndrewHansen,
With atomic snapshots, ReFS is finally a contender in the COW filesystem lineup. I would love to see some benchmarks comparing ReFS (w/ Storage Spaces) to ZFS and even a deep design/architectural comparison of the two. For instance, there is a belief among ZFS proponents that Storage Spaces is not viable in a parity configuration due to poor performance.
ZFS requires a lot of tuning to recover similar performance to non-COW systems in pathological use cases, particularly as backing storage for VMs and databases. ZFS uses a lot of RAM for read-caching, and can be configured to use dedicated, high-performance disks for that purpose. Instead of write-caching, ZFS uses a transaction log (ZIL), which also can be configured to use dedicated, low-latency disks. Once you're done with my other requests ;-), how about a guide to performance tuning ReFS without losing consistency or durability?
Finally, an honest comparison between these filesystems might not give a marketing-approved level of flattery to ReFS, youthful as it is, but you have ample opportunity to upstage ZFS deduplication, given that ZFS dedup design is not great. Online (sync at write) dedup is too expensive to justify, when there is so much to gain from integrated offline (async, lazy, background, scheduled, etc) dedup.