# ZFS for a desktop environment



## kr651129 (Aug 27, 2012)

I've read a lot about ZFS and it seems great for my homeserver but what about for a desktop user?

Does anyone out there have ZFS setup for their desktop, have you found it to be good, bad or indifferent?

Additionally, would you even mess with converting from UFS to ZFS after your system is setup or should you do it from the start?


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## Bunyan (Aug 27, 2012)

1) As far as know, Open Solaris installed on ZFS and it worked great as a desktop as any other OS would.
2) One cannot convert UFS to ZFS. Sorry.


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## Beeblebrox (Aug 27, 2012)

I use ZFS on my desktop.
What are the results: Has some speed advantages (have not tested) plus you don't need to bother with partitions. I do not have RAID, mirror, etc - backup is manual (through ZFS znapshot).
- My swap is separate and not part of zvol, however some setups prefer to take the risk with swap-on-zfs anyway.
- One big advantage is error checking and error detection through ZFS even if you don't have RAID.
- I use ZFS even though I have not given it the whole HDD. So I have partitioned a section for use under FreeBSD and that partition has ZFS on it, even though most ZFS tutorials talk about giving ZFS the whole HDD. Either work, but there are nuances for the setup depending on which way you choose to go.

Is it worth UFS to ZFS converting: I would say yes, with one caveat - the HDD needs to be RAW if you give ZFS the whole disk or GPT strongly preferred if you do a manual partition. Under manual partition you also need to place a small boot-bios partition at the start of the HDD. Conversion has to be copy -> paste and is not automatic.


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## vermaden (Aug 27, 2012)

@kr651129

I use setup from point *3.3.*, works great along with *beadm *for Boot Environments on ZFS 
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=31662


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## kr651129 (Aug 29, 2012)

Beeblebrox said:
			
		

> I use ZFS on my desktop.
> What are the results: Has some speed advantages (have not tested) plus you don't need to bother with partitions. I do not have RAID, mirror, etc - backup is manual (through ZFS znapshot).
> - My swap is separate and not part of zvol, however some setups prefer to take the risk with swap-on-zfs anyway.
> - One big advantage is error checking and error detection through ZFS even if you don't have RAID.
> ...



I guess I don't understand why ZFS would have any speed advantages, it requires more memory and has error checking.  From everything I'v read that ZFS does it seems like it would slow down your system.

There are several tutorials on how to setup ZFS, it seems like there are a ton of ways to set it up.  For a standard desktop what is the best way to set it up?

Also-- is it still required to tune your kernel to keep from panics? (http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide)


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