Thread: Moving to ZFS
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Old 16th October 2008
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phoenix phoenix is offline
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If you have a 64-bit system with lots of RAM (8+ GB) and CPU (4+ cores), ZFS is amazing!! Especially as a file server and backup server.

If you have a 64-bit system with adequate RAM (4+ GB) and CPU (2+ cores), ZFS is still very nice. Just depends on the load you put on it. We could lock up a system using 2x Opteron 200 CPUs and 8 GB DDR1 RAM by running 10+ simultaneous rsyncs. Same harddrives in a system with 2x Opteron 2200 CPUs and 8 GB DDR2 RAM doesn't flinch when running 40+ simultaneous rsyncs.

If you have a 32-bit system with 2-4 GB of RAM and a 2 GHz CPU, you can get decent performance out of ZFS by maxing out the kmem and tuning the ARC. But it can take a lot of fiddling and time to get it to a nice setup. Took me about a month to get the right values for my system (2 GB RAM). Haven't noticed any issues that are directly related to ZFS.

If you have a 32-bit system with less than 2 GB of RAM or 2 GHz CPU, don't bother with ZFS.
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