<acronym>ZIL
</acronym> accelerates synchronous transactions by using storage devices like
<acronym>SSD
</acronym>s that are faster than those used in the main storage pool. When an application requests a synchronous write (a guarantee that the data has been safely stored to disk rather than merely cached to be written later), the data is written to the faster
<acronym>ZIL
</acronym> storage, then later flushed out to the regular disks. This greatly reduces latency and improves performance. Only synchronous workloads like databases will benefit from a
<acronym>ZIL
</acronym>. Regular asynchronous writes such as copying files will not use the
<acronym>ZIL
</acronym> at all.