The minimum amount of memory needed to use ZFS.

[Ian Lepore]

On Wed, 2015-12-23 at 21:43 +1100, Stephen Hocking wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Inspired by this article:
> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/rsync-net-zfs-r
> eplication-to-the-cloud-is-finally-here-and-its-fast/
> 
> I am wondering about changing my offsite back strategy, which
> currently is
> made up of a Raspberry Pi with an external 3TB drive sitting at my
> brother's house, with periodic manual rsyncs. I'd like to change that
> to
> doing zfs replications.
> 
> I want to use some of my ARM based hardware as the target for the ZFS
> replication, owing to its low power usage. I have a few Cubiboxes
> floating
> around with around 2G of RAM, and a RPI2 or a Banana Pi with 1G. It'd
> have
> a UFS root on the SD card, and ZFS on the external drive.
> 
> Any ideas?

People have reported running arm systems using zfs in as little as
512MB (on a beaglebone), but it's a long way from "it boots" to "it's
useful" and I have no idea if they were using the systems for anything
other than proof of concept.

I wouldn't consider using an rpi for even a moment.  They're just too
slow and the chipset too crippled to be useful as anything other than a
toy, IMO.  A Cubox (4 cores @1.2GHz, 2GB ram) should work fine.  Right
now your only storage option is a USB drive, (it has an eSata port but
we don't have the ahci driver working on that platform yet).

The freebsd-arm mailing list might get you replies from people who've
been down this road themselves.

-- Ian