deciding UFS vs ZFS

[RW]

On Fri, 18 Jul 2014 09:48:24 +0100
krad wrote:

> "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.

Usually the reason someone adds extra drives to a desktop is that they
need extra storage. I very much doubt that many people are going to
want to keep multiple copies of everything. In any case ZFS isn't
guaranteed to be able to keep copies on separate drives.

Drive failure is by far the most important source of data loss
on Desktops, and with decent journalling (or equivalent), practically
the only thing worth worrying about for most people. Data rot will
occur, but it's unlikely it will make a difference to desktop data.


> "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.

Yes, I know ZFS has overheads, but ARC is potentially better than OS
caching. The question was whether, with a decent amount memory, ZFS can
actually be faster than UFS.