How safe is ZFS to use for a home user?

[John Klimek]

Has anybody ever lost data due to any bugs or anything like that?  I'm
going to use this ZFS as my primary storage medium (and poor man's
backup solution), so I would be devastated if I lost my entire array
due to a bug or other issue (aside from losing two hard drives in a
three hard drive RAID-Z array).

Also, my system is going to have 3x 400 GB (RAID-Z) and 1x 80 GB
(Standalone ZFS) and has 1.5 GB RAM (P3-1.0 GHz).

What should I be setting my kmem and kmem_max to (or whatever) to
avoid this bug I keep hearing about?

On Dec 21, 2007 10:20 PM, Wes Morgan <morganw at chemikals.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 21 Dec 2007, John Klimek wrote:
>
> > I'm looking to setup a file server using RAID 5 (or the equivilant
> > RAID-Z) and I'm interested in using ZFS.
> >
> > It looks like my primary options are Solaris or FreeBSD and since I'm
> > beginning to really dislike Solaris I'm leaning towards using FreeBSD
> > however I've heard that there are some issues with ZFS on FreeBSD
> > specifically regarding some "kmap_mem" or something like that.
> >
> > Can anybody tell me if ZFS is safe to use for home users?  I'm just
> > looking to setup RAID-Z with 3x 300 GB and another pool for 1x80GB (I
> > guess).
>
> I got tired of waiting for fsck's and have been using zfs for both my i386
> laptop and amd64 media server. I had a couple panics on the media server
> before I upgraded to 4gb of ram, but basically none since then. On the
> laptop, I can't recall having any, and it only has 1.5gb.
>
> I think that by the design of zfs, the panic might not even have a chance
> of damaging your data, only losing a write that had not completed, but I
> can't say I am an expert.
>
> In short, it has not given me any problems at all on two different
> configurations.
>
>