Who said anything about storage servers? I'm using zfs on laptops and desktops right now because I want data checksums and a filesystem that doesn't have a history of breaking horribly (I dropped btrfs after the second time it hosed my rootfs). Given the license issue with zfs - and in particular, the technical fallout like needing dkms - I'd be very pleased to replace it.

It’ll replace brtfs if it gets ported. Almost anything is better than that pile of garbage.

Both ZFS and modern btrfs support a large set of checksums.

Both implement sha256, which does impose a heavy speed penalty.

ZFS allows you to adjust the checksum on the fly, using something faster (Fletcher) if desired.

In btrfs, a global checksum is set at filesystem creation; xxhash is the best modern option.

There is a website: https://xxhash.com

Deduplication adds concerns for a strong hash free of collisions.

Yes, it adds some overhead, but it's fine IME. Granted, it helps that compression can significantly speed up performance. (I was very confused the first time I saw ZFS reading data faster than its drives were physically capable of, because it turned out the CPU could decompress faster than the drives could read)

Programs like filesystems typically have their own schedulers that aggregate writes, it would be an extreme performance hit if they wrote each checksum individually, as a separate I/O operation. They are certainly bundled with some other data that needs to be written.

And if you are concerned about the compute rather than storage, then writing to a block device is still slow enough so that computing a checksum isn't important performance-wise.

I never dug into the failure, but I once had a ZFS get to a state where it would crash the kernel on mount, I was able to mount it with checks turned off an recover what was important, but it was a spooky experience. I live on the bleeding edge of file systems for my desktop, I was on reiser4 back when that was fresh, I daily drive bcachefs (it's been great!) Mostly I've been lucky, I don't usually keep an openbsd system around, but I love FreeBSD and I'll give OpenBSD a try with GEFS for sure!

There was a long-running data corruption issue with non-raw sends that was finally found and patched in 2025: https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs-docs/issues/494. But I agree, it's about as safe as they come. I trust it far more than any other file system, in large part due to all its built-in redundancy and the way it makes backups trivial (encrypted sends <3)...

Its native encryption has something of a poor history

Indeed. If that URL is too crude then one may also use only9fans.com.

I do not believe so?

Drive is a 2TB Intel 670p NVMe SSD (INTEL SSDPEKNU020TZ) with 9078 power on hours and 42TBW - so pretty spry, but not at the start of the bathtub curve either.

It was mounted as fast storage for a Bitcoin node.

Perhaps the only 'unique' thing is it is using a NVMe to PCIe adapter card (Synology M2D20) due to this being my "legacy" server that's still rocking a Broadwell chip.

FFS corrupted multiple times on me, with intel video driver freezing on OpenBSD. My short OpenBSD sidetrack ended after reliably corrupting itself the third time... every time video driver panicking, leaving a corrupted filesystem after reboot, when I had eg. ports install going on during panic.

Windows ran fine on the machine (Lenovo 200) before, and Linux ran fine after. FFS (and the intel video drivers) are the weakest part of OpenBSD in my experience, I liked many other aspects.

I've seen file corruption with FFS on some of my OpenBSD servers, though them being VMs is likely a factor there.

Fragmentation in ZFS wastes a lot of space. So it doesnt matter if it's SSD or not.

The day I can furnish my NAS in SSDs for roughly the same price as HDDs probably won't come before any current filesystem is obsoleted for some reason or another, methinks.