But if you have a single board computer with 1 GB of RAM and several TB of ZFS, will it just be slow, or actually not run? Granted, my use case was abnormal, and I was evaluating in the early days when there were both license and quality concerns with ZFS on Linux. However, my understanding at the time was that it wouldn't actually work to have several TB in a ZFS pool with 1 GB of RAM.

My understanding is that ZFS has its own cache apart from the page cache, and the minimum cache size scales with the storage size. Did I misundertand/is my information outdated?