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The inline data reduction zero block removal phase detects blocks that contain only zeros and prevents them from being written to disk. This action both reduces disk space requirements and avoids unnecessary writes to SSD, resulting in increased drive longevity.
Zero block removal occurs first in the OneFS inline data reduction process. As such, it has the potential to reduce the amount of work that both inline deduplication and compression need to perform. The check for zero data does incur some overhead. However, for blocks that contain non-zero data the check is terminated on the first non-zero data found, which helps to minimize the impact.
The following characteristics are required for zero block removal to occur:
The write will convert the block to sparse if not already. A partial block of zeroes being written to a non-sparse, non-preallocated block will not be zero eliminated.