And for comparison with UFS: This is a solid “classic” filesystem. It does provide journaling, to protect data in case of crashes, power outages and the like. Very roughly speaking, it’s comparable to Linux’ ext4. It does NOT provide builtin RAID, checksumming, datasets, virtual volumes, snapshots, clones and all the stuff ZFS can do.
So, when to still prefer UFS? IMHO two possible reasons:
- You don’t have the RAM needed for ZFS’ ARC to work well. A rule of thumb for a recommended minimum I’ve often seen is 1GB per TB of storage.
- You have a special workload that performs much better on UFS. This should be pretty rare, but might happen.
Short version: if you have 4GB or more go with zfs.