Just sharing my personal experience. Context: I use XFS as the default file system on all HPC compute nodes, and few other servers that run CentOS7. I built

Just sharing my personal experience. Context: I use XFS as the default file system on all HPC compute nodes, and few other servers that run CentOS7. I built a FreeBSD+ZFS backup server recently to mirror our primary NAS. The experience with ZFS was so smooth and logical. All I needed was the ZFS section from the FreeBSD handbook, and I actually understood what was going on underneath to a reasonable extent. No magic - "run this command" without explanation. Once spools are set, ZFS datasets provide the equivalent of logical volumes you were asking for. You get a lot of tunables at that level, and they come with sensible defaults. The whole process is simple, heck you can even make a file act as a zpool for learning or testing purposes. Once done, I was testing performance rudimentarily and saw that it was almost saturating the network pipes beating my expectations without any time spent on custom perf tuning. And I get snapshots and online compression, SW RAID out of the box. I may be able to achieve most of it with XFS, some specific hardware and lot of hours of tuning, but it will never match the experience with ZFS. ZFS blog post: https://aravindh.net/post/zfs_fileserver/ https://aravindh.net/post/zfs_fileserver/ Performance: https://aravindh.net/post/zfs_performance/ https://aravindh.net/post/zfs_performance/