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Comment by sliken | Hacker News Reader

Last I checked the ZFS 128 bit values were not byte offsets, but block numbers. So the justification requires over 2^64 blocks, not 2^64 bytes.

I calculated it at some point and it was several years of the entire earths manufacturing capacity for disks in a single filesystem.

[added the missed "several years of"]

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If you accept the default 128k ZFS block size then it's 2,361,183,241,434,822,606,848 bytes, or 2,097,152 PB

Or, exactly 2 Zettabytes.

Also, the Z in ZFS :D

So, if they didn't use 128-bit... they'd have to change the name! /s

>The ZFS name is registered as a trademark of Oracle Corporation; although it was briefly given the retrofitted expanded name "Zettabyte File System", it is no longer considered an initialism.

—Wikipedia

I don't believe Wikipedia is right. Search site:oracle.com for zettabyte on google and observe the results being documents and blogs from a multitude of years.

ZFS being an acronym for Zettabyte File System was neither retrofitted nor all that brief in use it seems.

Former employees of Sun Microsystems, I know some of you browse HN. Care to shed some light on this?

Indeed, LLNL have a humongo Lustre/ZFS cluster and kickstarted the ZFSoL project(mucho gracias to LLNL and Brian Behlendorf) and they refer to it as a Zettabyte File System.

I wasn't in the room when it happened, but I was probably among the first dozen or so to hear the name -- and it was presented to me as both at once: "ZFS" was both "the last word in filesystems" and (conveniently) a zettabyte. I remember Bonwick quickly pointing out that yes, a yottabyte was larger but "YFS" was passed over for obvious reasons.

What's that obvious reason?

"Why? filesystem" I imagine.

Because "Z" matches the goal of being "the last word in filesystems" than "Y".

Interestingly, IBM has a filesystem used on the zOS mainframe OS, that is also called ZFS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS_(z/OS_file_system)

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