ZFS for a desktop computer

[Nicolas Martyanoff]

Hi,

I'm thinking about switching my main desktop to FreeBSD for various
reasons (main one, I love it on my laptop and server), and I've been
considering using ZFS. I'd like to have a disk-modular system, ie.:

- Being able to have mirroring.
- Being able to add new disks without effort.
- Being able to add new disks AND mirroring disks (spare disks ?) at
  the same time.

I'm gonna begin with 2x 1TB disks with mirroring, and I'd like to be
able to add, if needed, new disks, for example 2x 1.5TB to get 2.5TB
diskspace fully mirrored. The whole process shouldn't need to reinstall
the system, or to change the slice/partition layout, ie. be totally
transparent for the data.
And for this particular need, ZFS seems to be the way to go.

However, I'm a bit worried about FreeBSD's ZFS implementation:

- I've got a 64bits dual core 2GHz CPU, but can't use an amd64 FreeBSD
  since Xen, NVidia drivers and wine don't work on it; but ZFS is said
  to be unsuitable for i386.

- It's said you can't boot from a ZFS pool.

So could you please tell me if using ZFS is ok for me, or should I use
a gmirror system (but I don't think I can easily add new disks to this).

Thank you.

-- 
Nicolas Martyanoff
   http://codemore.org
   khaelin at gmail.com
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