I apologise for the perhaps slightly confrontative subject, but honestly this is the question that's been on my mind for quite some time now.
I've tried many times over the last handful of years to use ZFS on all of my Macs, and every time performance has been abysmal, and most often accompanied by kernel panics, system hangs and reboots galore. At one point I had to import my pool at that time as read-only between crashes just to get data off of it — importing as read/write would instacrash the Mac.
As I'm writing this, I've once more given up, and am currently moving data off of the second-to-last pool I have on the 16GB i7 Mac mini, a 2TB single-drive pool used for scratch data, such as completed torrents. Thing is, I'm not doing it with O3X — I've fired up a 4GB VM on the Mac with an Ubuntu live cd, and use rsync to move data from the pool to an HFS+ volume on the host. It's ticking along at 22 MB/s. Pretty slow for USB3, but okay for for compressed ZFS on a VM, I guess. Only thing is, the exact same operation run natively on the host using O3X gives me read speeds ranging from 500 kB/s to just over 2 MB/s. Same source, same target, same command, just not inside a VM with a single core and a quarter the memory allotted to it.
Again, I apologise for being that guy bitching over free and open software. I hate doing that, because I really do genuinely appreciate all the time put into this project, and despite all my grievances I really am grateful for any attempt at improving and porting ZFS everywhere.
It's just... I'm at that point. It cannot just be me. Seriously. It's the same result I get every time I try to use O3X, no matter the machine or disks I've thrown at it. Over several years and over a dozen attempts, it always — and quickly — ends up functionally defective. Whether it be the unusable performance, or the kernel panics, something is seriously wrong here. Please, if I'm being ungrateful and bitchy, I apologise. I don't want to sob, whine, yell, and bang the door. I'd much prefer for this software to actually work.
It's just that at this point, I really want to know if it actually works — truly — for any one of you? Can you truthfully use O3X on a serious daily basis as a storage driver, besides running tests or occasionally doing backups or something like that. And if so, how? Because all my attempts over these years have been unfruitful.
I still have one RAID-Z pool that I'd like to keep running on this mini, for local backups. It doesn't have to perform well (and by golly, it doesn't), just as long as it doesn't crash the machine, and everything's been very stable on this 16GB mini with no crashes yet, even if ZFS disrespects my ARC limits by a factor of five. But it'd be awesome if it could perform even at a quarter of the speed of ZFS running in a VM. That would make it able to achieve read speeds to match my internet upload and thus backup speed limit to the cloud.