>And most desktops have their 64bit CPU sat idle for most of the time, so there's not even an argument for the additional instruction overhead.
Most "desktops" today are in fact laptops, and the reason you want to have the CPU sit idle is battery time.
>However if your desktop is a development machine, used for multimedia authoring or even just an internet terminal (like most PCs are these days), then ZFS is a viable option.
If you're not pooling disks together but just have the built in disk, and usb hard disks that you conenct occasionally you don't get much if anything from ZFS, but you get the penalties it incurs...
And it's not a substitute for backing up your disks either...
> Most "desktops" today are in fact laptops, and the reason you want to have the CPU sit idle is battery time.
That's a fair point. I'd argue that ZFS doesn't chuck that much extra CPU time that most people would notice. However if you're one of those guys that likes to tweak your power settings to the nth degree, then ZFS probably isn't best. But those kinds of people are more likely to run a tiling WM instead of a full fat compositing desktop environment; and such like. So they're definitely not your regular desktop users
> If you're not pooling disks together but just have the built in disk, and usb hard disks that you conenct occasionally you don't get much if anything from ZFS, but you get the penalties it incurs...
You seem to have missed quite a number of useful ZFS features off your list. Ignoring deduplication (as that is extremely memory and CPU hungry), ZFS has snapshotting, checksumming, superblock recovery (even if your journal gets trashed, you can recover it), online data integrity checks (no annoying wait screens for fsck to run through), better compression algorithms than is supported in most other file systems...
I could go on, but suffice to say that ZFS is an improvement over many other file systems in other areas than just software RAIDing.
That all said, in an ideal world desktops would be running HAMMER (DragonflyBSD's file system) over ZFS. I do love ZFS, but HAMMER seems a slightly better fit for desktops / laptops as it has the aforementioned features but without many of the data centre stuff that home users wouldn't need. A better compromise. However I don't see much interest for HAMMER outside of Dragonfly.
> And it's not a substitute for backing up your disks either...
Nobody suggested it was. However ZFS does also have backup features built into it too.
Most "desktops" today are in fact laptops, and the reason you want to have the CPU sit idle is battery time.
>However if your desktop is a development machine, used for multimedia authoring or even just an internet terminal (like most PCs are these days), then ZFS is a viable option.
If you're not pooling disks together but just have the built in disk, and usb hard disks that you conenct occasionally you don't get much if anything from ZFS, but you get the penalties it incurs...
And it's not a substitute for backing up your disks either...