<acronym>ZFS
</acronym> is a fundamentally different file system because it is more than just a file system.
<acronym>ZFS
</acronym> combines the roles of file system and volume manager, enabling additional storage devices to be added to a live system and having the new space available on all of the existing file systems in that pool immediately. By combining the traditionally separate roles,
<acronym>ZFS
</acronym> is able to overcome previous limitations that prevented
<acronym>RAID
</acronym> groups being able to grow. Each top level device in a pool is called a
<emphasis>vdev
</emphasis>, which can be a simple disk or a
<acronym>RAID
</acronym> transformation such as a mirror or
<acronym>RAID-Z
</acronym> array.
<acronym>ZFS
</acronym> file systems (called
<emphasis>datasets
</emphasis>) each have access to the combined free space of the entire pool. As blocks are allocated from the pool, the space available to each file system decreases. This approach avoids the common pitfall with extensive partitioning where free space becomes fragmented across the partitions.