ZFS is more akin to a logical volume manager (inc. software raid) and a filesystem though. XFS is just a filesystem, it's not trying to solve the same issues.

ZFS is more akin to a logical volume manager (inc. software raid) and a filesystem though. XFS is just a filesystem, it's not trying to solve the same issues. Higher end RAID cards also do block level validations in the background. It isn't filesystem aware but it is sufficient to suss out bad clusters and relocate data proactively. The point of ZFS systems is to avoid such hardware based checksumming systems, but RAID cards have been doing this validation for many years now. The hardware solutions we have now provide silent corruption protection from the storage controller down to the actual media. ZFS extends that protection to the filesystem layer in the kernel and when used in isolation of modern hardware solutions can protect the whole stack.