# Beginners ZFS question (Will it work for me)



## danaeckel (Mar 15, 2012)

Hello.

   I have been reading about ZFS, and get a bit confused about some things. I have a 32-bit AMD XP2700 system with 3GB of RAM. The HDD I have is 200GB ATA-133 with 8MB of Cache. The *Free*BSD I will use is version 9. Is it possible to use ZFS on a single drive system like this? Would I have to re-format to use it? Thats all.

Dana


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## mamalos (Mar 15, 2012)

What do you mean when you say "reformat"? The general answer would be "Yes, you can", but there are few ways you can configure it (eg. boot or not boot from it, format FreeBSD slices as ZFS, format partitions as ZFS, format files as ZFS, and more). I suppose that you'll have to find some empty resource of those I've mentioned in order to allocate them for ZFS, so in one sense: Yes, you may have to reformat.

And if things haven't changed much through these last years, you'll might have to use some tunning options on i386. Take a look at the Handbook, the wiki and this for more information.
Good luck.


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## throAU (Mar 16, 2012)

It is not recommended to use ZFS on 32 bit only systems.  Irrespective of how much RAM you actually have, 32 bit address space isn't really enough.

With a single drive, the benefits of ZFS are somewhat limited in any case - no self healing as only 1 copy of your data (unless you store multiple copies on the same drive, which will hurt performance badly).  With only 3gb RAM, you will not get read-ahead by default either.

Are you planning to use this machine as a desktop, or as a file server only?  If it is going to be a desktop, I would strongly recommend just going with UFS for now; with your current configuration, many of the benefits just aren't there, and there are plenty of drawbacks.


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## danaeckel (Mar 16, 2012)

Thanks for the heads up. There arn't any plans to use it as a desktop. It served it's use as one, and time to move it into a server role. It will be doing more than being a file server. It is also acting as a gate, firewall, and store backups on USB 1TB drive.

Thanks for your advice!

Dana


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