R&D: Staying in the Zone – Retrofitting Zoned Storage into Scalable Enterprise File System
Authors introduce Zoned XFS, which adds zoned storage support to XFS by implementing zoned space allocator, intelligent data placement, and high-throughput garbage collector
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on January 22, 2026 at 2:00 pmACM Digital Library has published, in APSys ’25: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems, an article written by Christoph Hellwig, Western Digital Research, Innsbruck, Austria, Hans Holmberg, Western Digital Research, Malmö, Sweden, and Damien Le Moal, Western Digital Research, Fujisawa, Japan.
Abstract: “Zoned storage enables higher storage densities with Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) hard disks and reduces costs and improves tail latency with Zoned Namespace (ZNS) SSDs. However, the adoption of zoned storage has been limited by the absence of suitable general-purpose file systems allowing the use of unmodified applications.“
“We introduce Zoned XFS, which adds zoned storage support to XFS by implementing a zoned space allocator, intelligent data placement, and a high-throughput garbage collector. Our performance evaluation shows that Zoned XFS achieves higher performance for large file read and write workloads compared to the BTRFS and F2FS file systems, even in the presence of garbage collection. With RocksDB, Zoned XFS achieves significantly higher throughput with mixed read/write and overwrite workloads compared to F2FS. Furthermore, Zoned XFS compares favorably with the RocksDB special-purpose ZenFS zoned storage backend.“
“Zoned XFS seamlessly enables the benefits of zoned storage for unmodified applications such as key-value stores or distributed storage systems.“
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