Probably. LVM gives you writable snapshots. I’m not trying to dis Solaris or ZFS, or talk up Linux like a fanboy, but whenever you ask a rhetorical like that about Linux, the answer is usually “yes.”

Having said that, ZFS does look like it has a swag of fantastic features and I will definitely jump on board when it is stable and mature.

I am planning a home fileserver and ZFS was the first thing I thought of using. I especially like the self-healing of data, built-in RAID, quick setup and volume management.

But on further inspection, it lacks a few key features like adding devices to a RAID-Z pool, handling low memory situations gracefully and pool reduction.

OpenSolaris didn’t run well on my machines despite the HCL test programme reporting things as being okay. And FreeBSD’s implementation of ZFS still has a way to go before I would use it on my precious data.

So, at the end of the day, I’m gonna end up with Linux, dm-raid and LVM. I can expand the pool easily and I have confidence that my data is safe. Maybe in a year or two ZFS will give me that same confidence.

Cheers,

McP.