Skip to main content

Zoned Storage

Zoned Storage is an open source, standards-based initiative to enable data centers to scale efficiently for the zettabyte storage capacity era. There are two technologies behind Zoned Storage, Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) in ATA/SCSI HDDs and Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) in NVMe SSDs.

Host-managed SMR HDDs, NVMe ZNS SSDs, and Emulated Devices.

Zoned block deviceInteractive model
Target zone

Zone 01: 3/8 blocks written. Next write → LBA 11.

Illustration of sequential-write-required zones. Writes to the selected zone advance its write pointer; finishing a zone makes it full without writing the remaining blocks; a reset discards its data.

Storage InterfacesSCSI ZBC, ATA ZAC, NVMe ZNS, and Emulated Devices

Host-managed SMR HDDsShingled Magnetic RecordingNVMe ZNS SSDsZoned Namespaces
Linux Ecosystem
Linux user-space utilities and file systems connect through the kernel zoned block interface to storage devices.

Getting Started

Zoned storage devices require a compatible Linux kernel providing sequential write control and zone management. Learn how to set up a zoned storage enable system and how to start using zoned storage devices.

Linux kernel, Linux distributions and zoned storage device setup.

Reference

Linux zoned storage support

Linux kernel interfaces and userspace components.

Documentation overview

Community

Support and contributions

Technical discussion is available on Matrix and IRC. Documentation changes are submitted through GitHub pull requests.