ZFS merges the traditional volume management and filesystem layers.

• It uses a copy-on-write transactional mechanism.
  • The system is very structurally different than conventional filesystems and RAID arrays.
• The first set of major building blocks to understand are zpools, vdevs, and devices.

zpool

vdev

device

Datasets

Blocks

Sectors

Copy-on-Write semantics

ZIL (ZFS Intent Log)

Compression