How safe is ZFS to use for a home user?

[Wes Morgan]

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.