[Zombie thread returns from the grave...] > > Getting back to 'consumer' use for a moment, > though, > > given that something like 90% of consumers entrust > > their PC data to the tender mercies of Windows, and > a > > large percentage of those neither back up their > data, > > nor use RAID to guard against media failures, nor > > protect it effectively from the perils of Internet > > infection, it would seem difficult to assert that > > whatever additional protection ZFS may provide > would > > make any noticeable difference in the consumer > space > > - and that was the kind of reasoning behind my > > comment that began this sub-discussion. > > As a consumer at home, IT guy at work and amateur > photographer, I think ZFS will help change that.
Let's see, now: Consumer at home? OK so far. IT guy at work? Nope, nothing like a mainstream consumer, who doesn't want to know about anything like the level of detail under discussion here. Amateur photographer? Well, sort of - except that you seem to be claiming to have reached the *final* stage of evolution that you lay out below, which - again - tends to place you *well* out of the mainstream. Try reading my paragraph above again and seeing just how closely it applies to people like you. > Here's what I think photogs evolve through: > ) What are negatives? - Mom/dad taking holiday > photos > 2) Keep negatives in the envelope - average snapshot > photog > 3) Keep them filed in boxes - started snapping with a > SLR? Might be doing darkroom work > 4) Get acid free boxes - pro/am. > 5) Store slides in archival environment (humidity, > temp, etc). - obsessive > > In the digital world: > 1) keeps them on the card until printed. Only keeps > the print > 2) copies them to disk & erases them off the card. > Gets burned when system disk dies > 2a) puts them on CD/DVD. Gets burned a little when the > disk dies and some photos not on CD/DVDs yet. OK so far. My wife is an amateur photographer and that's the stage where she's at. Her parents, however, are both retired *professional* photographers - and that's where they're at as well. > 3a) gets an external USB drive to store things. Gets > burned when that disk dies. That sounds as if it should have been called '2b' rather than '3a', since there's still only one copy of the data. > 3b) run raid in the box. > 3c) gets an external RAID disk (buffalo/ReadyNAS, > etc). While these (finally) give you some redundancy, they don't protect against loss due to user errors, system errors, or virii (well, an external NAS might help some with the last two, but not a simple external RAID). They also cost significantly more (and are considerably less accessible to the average consumer) than simply keeping a live copy on your system plus an archive copy (better yet, *two* archive copies) on DVDs (the latter is what my wife and her folks do for any photos they care about). > 4) archives to multiple places. > etc... At which point you find out that you didn't need RAID after all (see above): you just leave the photos on a flash card (which are dirt-cheap these days) and your system disk until they've been copied to the archive media. > > 5) gets ZFS and does transfer direct to local disk > from flash card. Which doesn't give you any data redundancy at all unless you're using multiple drives (guess how many typical consumers do) and doesn't protect you from user errors, system errors, or virii (unless you use an external NAS to help with the last two - again, guess how many typical consumers do) - and you'd *still* arguably be better off using the approach I described in my previous paragraph (since there's nothing like off-site storage if you want *real* protection). In other words, you can't even make the ZFS case for the final-stage semi-professional photographer above, let alone anything remotely resembling a 'consumer': you'd just really, really like to justify something that you've become convinced is hot. There's obviously been some highly-effective viral marketing at work here. > > Today I can build a Solaris file server for a > reasonable price with off the shelf parts ($300 + > disks). *Build* a file server? You must be joking: if a typical consumer wants to *buy* a file server they can do so (though I'm not sure that a large percentage of 'typical' consumers actually *have* done so) - but expecting them to go out and shop for one running ZFS is - well, 'hopelessly naive' doesn't begin to do the idea justice. I can't get near that for a WAFL based > system. Please don't try to reintroduce WAFL into the consumer part of this discussion: I though we'd finally succeeded in separating the sub-threads. ... > I can see ZFS coming to ready made networked RAID box > that a pro-am photographer could purchase. *If* s/he had any interest in ZFS per se - see above. I don't > ever see that with WAFL. And either FS on a network > RAID box will be less error prone then a box running > ext3/xfs as is typical now. 'Less error prone', while a nice marketing message, doesn't actually mean squat: the question is whether it's *sufficiently* less error-prone to be significant to the average user, and AFAICT the answer is a definite "No". - bill This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
