ZFSin VS openzfs

It is possible to run a fork of ZFS on Windows. For that you will want https://openzfsonwindows.org/. However, I have no idea of the integrity of the project, or, whether it is stock ZFS but with windows drivers or not. It also likely has some tradeoffs that I cannot speak too. I would be dubious of using it without playing around with it a lot first.

OpenZFS on Windows homepage and the releases. I have never used it, just seen some demo on one of the ZFS conference videos.

Phase 2: No WSL but OpenZFS on Windows

You might like to ask in the forum that's linked from https://openzfsonwindows.org/; there are a few Windows-related posts.

apparently this is a thing but ymmv.

So ZFS is my cheap RAID option. Idk how much windows support there is if people are in windows, there's the windows port but idk what kind of issues they currently have. Haven't tried it, I live in linux.

Heads up, installing both WinBTRFS and OpenZFS on Windows may have problems:

"Win OpenZFS driver and WinBtrfs driver dont play well with each other"

https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs/issues/364

I tried it a few months ago and ReFS ate my data. No indication of why in event logs or SMART data. It had IsPowerProtected set because I have a UPS and I had a unclean restart, I would expect it to lose data, but not to corrupt the filesystem metadata. I had a backup of the data but wanted some recent changes. Refsutil (the official Microsoft tool) didn't help because it has not been updated for the newest ReFS version. I couldn't read most files because I had integrity enable and files failed the check. Hetman's Data Recovery was able to recover most of the data. In later testing I found out that IsPowerProtected is just very unsafe. I have since put some time into testing and sometimes fixing https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs , it is not ready for use yet, but it is making great progress.

Windows lacks support in the same sense that Linux lacks support; there are external projects implementing it for both, though I believe the Windows port is less polished. (Some people are running it in production, though...)

This is really cool and speaks to the modularity of the Windows file system stack. I love projects that customize Windows (working against its closed-source nature).

There’s an OpenZFA port to Windows[0]. I wonder if my hopes of having ZFS on Windows (including the boot drive, because I would love to be able to snapshot and rollback) would actually be possible.

[0] https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs

*cough* it can, but... no idea how well it works but it seems a bit hacky.

If you have not used it, maybe the native ZFS port for windows could be an easier solution.

Theoretically ZFS is ported to windows, but I heard that it is not really stable yet.

I did use the packages provided here: https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs/releases/tag/zfswin-2.1.6rc2