"As a desktop distribution built atop FreeBSD, PC-BSD makes available to the desktop user all the cool technologies inside FreeBSD. One of those cool technologies is ZFS, the Zettabyte File System, a file system developed by Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle Corporation) for the Solaris operating system. ZFS has no parallel in the Linux/BSD world. It packs features that no other file system in the Linux kernel has (btrfs is a potential answer for ZFS in the Linux kernel, but it is still a work in progress).
"This post presents a step by step guide on how to install PC-BSD 8.1, the latest version of PC-BSD, on a single-disk, encrypted ZFS file system. While using ZFS on a single disk system does not take full advantage of the powerful features of ZFS, this configuration allows a user who might not have access to a multiple disk machine to play with some of the basic features of ZFS.
"Experienced BSD users likely will not need this tutorial, but if you are new to the BSD world, this ability to use ZFS should be a very good reason to distro-hop, if temporarily, to PC-BSD. Note that the minimum memory requirements for running ZFS is 512 MB. Failure to adhere to this simple requirement could lead to unpredictable results."
