[tnorgaard]

Please stop spreading this misinformed statement. I assume you are referring to the ZFS ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache). It works in much the same way as a regular Linux page cache. It does not take much more memory (if you disable prefetch) and will only use what is available/idle. We use Linux with ZFS on production systems with as low as 1GB memory. We stopped counting the times it has saved the day. :-)

ECC is a nice to have, but ZFS does not have special requirement over say a regular page cache. The only difference is that ZFS will discovery bit-flips instead of just ignoring them as ext4 or xfs would do.

[3legcat]

> ECC is nice to have.

Actually it seems ECC is important for ZFS filesystems see:

http://louwrentius.com/please-use-zfs-with-ecc-memory.html

[solarengineer]

To be clear, it is not ZFS that requires or even mandates ECC. Since ZFS uses data as present in memory and has checks for everything post that, it is prudent to have memory checks at the hardware level.

Thus, if one is using ZFS for data reliability, one ought to use ECC memory as well.

[gbrown_]

> Actually it seems ECC is important for ZFS filesystems see:

The inflection made by the previous comment tends to lead people to think ECC RAM is needed for ZFS specifically. As the blog post you link to points out it's equally applicable to all filesystems.

[blablabloe]

It's not required, but it doesn't make sense to use ZFS but not to use ECC memory. That's the point. It's like locking the backdoor but leaving the front door wide open.

[h2hn]

Interesting.

That's rigth the kind of hardware I was referring to, 1 GB of plain RAM. Truly, I haven't tested ZFS yet for that reason I've always read that ZFS has big requirements so I refrained to try it. It seems I should give it a try. ;)

Btrfs is another story I've used it for years and I'd prefer not to have to use it anymore untill it'll become "stable" and "performance". :)

[Laforet]

FreeNAS != ZFS. The former is a specialised storage system that has to meet a very different set of criteria than a lightweight server with 1GB ram.