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@subnetspider@mastodon.bsd.cafe

2026-09-17 17:08 UTC

I always find it funny when someone on the Internet says "ZFS is memory hungry" or "ZFS needs at least 8 GB of ECC RAM to run". Nonsense. To prove it, I installed #FreeBSD 15.1 (64 bit!) on a 23 year old PC, with ZFS and only 1 GB of RAM, running multiple jails without issue. 😎 It has been a bit tricky to get FreeBSD 15.1 to boot off a modern SATA drive, but I found some old PCI SATA controller I bought way back in the Windows 7 days which is still supported. The single core AMD Athlon 64 3000+ is a bit slow, but pkgbase really helps with speeding up installing patches. It's still fast enough to reach 604 Mbit/s in iperf3 (and 490 Mbit/s in client mode). If I wanted to, I could even turn this ancient machine into a NAS, which really proves that old PCs aren't trash, but modern software is.

Replies (1)

  • @mroach@ublog.mroach.com 2026-09-17 17:36

    @subnetspider@mastodon.bsd.cafe ZFS is memory hungry the same way System Idle Process is CPU hungry :p Love this project! Modern software really is such trash.

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