# FreeBSD, zfs and ssd



## Roberth (Sep 17, 2012)

Does the installer in FreeBSD 9.1 support installing FreeBSD on an zfs formatted drive? And is it wise since it is an ssd drive? I have 8 GB of ram so I don't need swap for my usage.

It is a regular desktop computer, will be running amd64.


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## wblock@ (Sep 17, 2012)

Roberth said:
			
		

> Does the installer in freebsd 9.1 support installing freebsd on an zfs formatted drive?



No, bsdinstall(8) does not.  It's not that it can't be done, just the current version does not do it.  The PC-BSD installer can install FreeBSD, and on ZFS (last time I looked, anyway).



> And is it wise since it is an ssd drive? I have 8 gb of ram so I dont need swap for my usage.
> 
> It is a regular desktop computer, will be running amd64.



Wise?  Depends on if you need the features of ZFS.  SSD are relatively small, so the advantages of ZFS are not as useful on them.

It is recommended to allow at least some swap.  The system can use it for efficiency even if there is plenty of RAM.


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## Roberth (Sep 18, 2012)

Okay, well, I think ZFS is great filesystem and I find very good performance wise so I wanted to try it out, but I thought I'd rather hear here instead of wasting time trying to do something that won't work whatever I do.

EDIT: AFAIK, PCBSD can install just a vanilla FreeBSD basesystem?


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## CanOfBees (Sep 18, 2012)

Roberth said:
			
		

> EDIT: AFAIK, PCBSD can install just a vanilla freebsd basesystem?


Yes!


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## Roberth (Sep 18, 2012)

Well then I'll just install vanilla FreeBSD 9.1 or whatever I decide to with PC-BSD's installer. Since I am not used to *BSDs, the graphical tools makes me more aware of what I am doing.


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