> > >... > >though I'm not familiar with any recent examples in > normal desktop environments > > > > > One example found during early use of zfs in Solaris > engineering was > a system with a flaky power supply. > > It seemed to work just fine with ufs but when zfs was > installed the > sata drives started to shows many ZFS checksum > errors. > > After replacing the powersupply, the system did not > detect any more > errors. > > Flaky powersupplies are an important contributor to > PC unreliability; they > also tend to fail a lot in various ways.
Thanks - now that you mention it, I think I remember reading about that here somewhere. But did anyone delve into these errors sufficiently to know that they were specifically due to controller or disk firmware bugs (since you seem to be suggesting by the construction of your response above that they were) rather than, say, to RAM errors (if the system in question didn't have ECC RAM, anyway) between checksum generation and disk access on either reads or writes (the CERN study found a correlation even using ECC RAM between detected RAM errors and silent data corruption)? Not that the generation of such otherwise undetected errors due to a flaky PSU isn't interesting in its own right, but this specific sub-thread was about whether poor connections were a significant source of such errors (my comment about controller and disk firmware bugs having been a suggested potential alternative source) - so identifying the underlying mechanisms is of interest as well. - bill This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
