deciding UFS vs ZFS

[krad]

"I don't understand why you think that. My point was that losing random
files from everything can be far more disruptive than losing files from
a single mountpoint."

Well thats why you would use copies=1+n one each dataset that was on a
single drive. That way you wouldnt lose anything. If your that worried
about drive failures though you should be using some kind of raid.

"I was really more interested in whether ZFS (with ARC) is faster than
UFS with FreeBSD's own file caching. A lot of people say that putting
an OS on SSD gives a significant speed-up. 16GB should be more than
enough to keep the important system files in memory, so it sounds like
smarter caching might be useful."

If you want speed sure UFS is faster on the same machine, but thats because
its doing less. In the real world I dont notice any
performance penalty running zfs, but thats based on my workloads. Yes if i
ran benchmarks I would see a difference, but im nowhere running at the
limits of my hardware/software so its not an issue. Therefore I would
rather have the extra layers of integrity that zfs supplies over ufs.

I also try to base my decisions on based on fact, experiences of others and
best practices. Dont get me wrong it can all go wrong with zfs, its just
what are the odds compared with other file systems.