It's not clear to me what problem you are trying to solve and why ZFS would be
a good solution for it. The elephant in the room, with regards your use case,
is backups, IMHO. That said:
On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 11:07:57PM -0400, Nick Lidakis wrote:
With one user reading one FLAC file at a time from a machine running ZFS
does one need a modern CPU and gobs of RAM? I understand ECC RAM and a 64 bit
OS is recommended.
Omitting ZFS, absolutely not. I'd be very surprised if you couldn't do this
with ZFS too, even on something like a Raspberry Pi. I used to use mt-daapd to
real- time decode MP3s, AACs and FLACs to 16/44.1 WAV and stream over 801.11g
to various devices, using an old ARM-powered NAS device (thecus n2100) which
is very underpowered by today's standards.
Can my desktop run ZFS on the discs with the music files and use a separate
disk with ext3 for my daily tasks? If yes, should I run 64bit Debian or just
use lots of RAM and PAE?
If your HW supports it, opt for 64 bit.