deciding UFS vs ZFS

[RW]

On Mon, 14 Jul 2014 11:12:21 +0800
Erich Dollansky wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Sun, 13 Jul 2014 19:40:14 -0500
> Andrew Berg <aberg010 at my.hennepintech.edu> wrote:
> 
> > On 2014.07.13 18:14, Erich Dollansky wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > use UFS as long as you are working with a single disk and ZFS the
> > > moment you have more than one disk.
> > Checksumming and the COW features make ZFS quite attractive for
> > single-device pools as well.
> 
> there are also other features which could make ZFS attractive for
> single disk systems. But moving to a second disk only makes ZFS not
> just attractive but basically a must.

On a desktop, without raid, I would expect ZFS to make things a lot
worse in the case of a disk failure because it would spread the damage
around all the directories. 

For that reason I'm putting my desktop user data on ufs/gjournal, but I
was wondering about putting the OS on ZFS. I don't think I'd get much
benefit from Checksumming, COW, compression etc, but I was wondering
whether ARC does a significantly better job of caching to justify ZFS's
overheads; I have 16GB of RAM.