# ZFS on laptop?



## Nollo (Oct 19, 2011)

Hello,

I did some searches about this question but I didn't find something pertinent to make my decision.

ZFS seems a very good file system. I heard good things about it, and some of its features are very interesting and useful. Currently, my main computer is a laptop (with 500gb, 4gb RAM ...) and I wonder if such a file system is a good idea.

I have a personal use of this computer, but I also use it as workstation. I do programming, experimenting (learning UNIX/BSD, again and again ...), and basic uses (web, music, videos ...).

Would you recommend me to use ZFS as file system? Thanks.


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## SirDice (Oct 19, 2011)

Why not? It really doesn't matter if it's a laptop or not. Last time I re-organized my workstation I opted to go the full ZFS route. Seems to work fine, I haven't had any issues at all.


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## Nollo (Oct 19, 2011)

That's the point ! I don't know why not.

I wondered if ZFS has bad performance on laptop or completly useless, like having a porsche to go to buy bread 

I'll give a try :stud


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## davidgurvich (Oct 19, 2011)

I've used zfs on a p3 with 1GB of ram and some tweaks for low memory systems.  There may be some power saving issues that I didn't look for.

I didn't notice any difference in performance from ufs other than the larger memory requirements.


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## vermaden (Oct 19, 2011)

Nollo said:
			
		

> Would you recommend me to use ZFS as file system? Thanks.


Definitely.

4 GB RAM is plenty for ZFS, and no other filesystem can achieve such data integrity and flexibility as ZFS, I do not want to start mentioning all of its features, its pointless (and very long to mention them all).

Personally, I also use ZFS on my laptop.


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## phoenix (Oct 19, 2011)

In a standard "one harddrive" laptop, you won't get any of the redundancy/self-healing features of ZFS, but you will still get all the other features (checksums, compression, dedupe, snapshots, clones, filesystems, scrub, notifications of bad data/corrupted blocks).

However, if you don't mind giving up a little write performance and (up to) half your disk space, then you can set *copies=2* on certain filesystems.  That will write out 2 copies of every data block to the disk, in different parts of the disk.  That way, if ZFS reads a block, notices the checksum is wrong (corrupt data), then it can read from the other copy on disk.  If that block checksum is correct, then it will write that data back out to disk (thus "healing" the corrupt data).

It's a poor-man's redundancy setup.  You will halve your write speed (which is already low on a laptop), but greatly increase your data integrity and resiliency.  Of course, if the drive itself dies, you lose everything.    But it protects against bitrot and random corruptions on disk, and can give you enough warning of a failing disk that you can get your data off before it completely dies.


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## bbzz (Oct 19, 2011)

I run zfs on top of 256bit geli encrypted disk on 10 year old Sony laptop with 768 MB RAM. So far it only restarted once, but I don't know if its due to ZFS.


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## Dru (Oct 19, 2011)

I am completely at loss to any benefits of running ZFS on a laptop. From what I have read here, the performance seems to be a little slower, or equal to UFS, and you're not going to be building a storage system, or adding drives inside your laptop, nor would I consider a laptop for something that I intended to carry important data on for long periods, to which is my only copy, integrity wouldn't be that important. Seems like more of a bragging factor outside of server, and home storage use.

I'm not trying to be negative, and there may be something I have been missing, or misunderstand, I just don't see it.


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## bbzz (Oct 19, 2011)

It's really simple; if you don't understand the benefit of it (all of which have been mentioned above), then you probably don't need it.


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## phoenix (Oct 19, 2011)

Snapshots, snapshots, snapshots, and, oh yeah, snapshots.  

Compression is also handy.  And send/recv has it's uses.  But it's probably the snapshots and checksums that are the most useful, regardless of where you use it.


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## avilla@ (Oct 19, 2011)

phoenix said:
			
		

> Snapshots, snapshots, snapshots, and, oh yeah, snapshots.
> 
> Compression is also handy.  And send/recv has it's uses.  But it's probably the snapshots and checksums that are the most useful, regardless of where you use it.



And being able to create filesystems on the fly, THE feature in my opinion. And yes, I'm using it on a laptop.


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## Nollo (Oct 20, 2011)

Thanks all for your answers. You convinced me to use it 

Do you have any partition structure suggestion for a single drive ?


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