[KMag]

But if you have a single board computer with 1 GB of RAM and several TB of ZFS, will it just be slow, or actually not run? Granted, my use case was abnormal, and I was evaluating in the early days when there were both license and quality concerns with ZFS on Linux. However, my understanding at the time was that it wouldn't actually work to have several TB in a ZFS pool with 1 GB of RAM.

My understanding is that ZFS has its own cache apart from the page cache, and the minimum cache size scales with the storage size. Did I misundertand/is my information outdated?

[homebrewer]

> will it just be slow

This. I use it on a tiny backup server with only 1 GB of RAM and a 4 TB HDD pool, it's fine. Only one machine backs up to that server at a time, and they do that at network speed (which is admittedly only 100 Mb/s, but it should go somewhat higher if it had faster network). Restore also runs ok.

[KMag]

Thanks for this. I initially went with xfs back when there were license and quality concerns with zfs on Linux before btrfs was a thing, and moved to btrfs after btrfs was created and matured a bit.

These days, I think I would be happier with zfs and one RAID-Z pool across all of the disks instead of individual btrfs partitions or btrfs on RAID 5.

[doublepg23]

I would think ZFS would suck on a 1GB machine due to likely being a 32 bit machine. If you had a 1GB in a 64 bit rig it should be fine.

ZFS does have its own cache (influenced by being Solaris native) but it’s very fast to evict pages.