I have created a new FreeNAS tutorial video previewing ZFS on FreeNAS 0.7. It has been uploaded to YouTube.

Following the success of the RAID5 FreeNAS tutorial video this next video is a sneak preview of ZFS which is coming in FreeNAS 0.7.

ZFS is a file system designed by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris Operating System. ZFS is open-source software and has therefore also been ported to FreeBSD the OS behind FreeNAS.

A traditional file systems resides on single hard drive and if you want to use more than one hard drive they need to be combined either with RAID or with a volume manager.

ZFS is different, all ZFS filesystems are built on top of virtual storage pools called zpools. A zpool is constructed of virtual devices, which are themselves constructed of physical hard drives (or indeed files or hard drive partitions).

Hard drives within a virtual device may be configured in different ways, depending on needs and space available: non-redundantly (similar to RAID 0), as a mirror (RAID 1) of two or more devices, as a RAID-Z group of three or more devices (which is similar to RAID 5), or as a RAID-Z2 group of four or more devices (which is similar to RAID 6).

FreeNAS 0.7 is only an alpha release from the nightly build system and ZFS is considered experimental, but it does give us a sneak preview of what is in store for FreeNAS.

The video will also be uploaded to the LearnFreeNAS.com website.