On Feb 26, 2014, at 10:51 PM, Daniel Becker <razzf...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Incidentally, that paper came up in a ZFS-related thread on Ars Technica just > the other day (as did the link to the FreeNAS forum post). Let me just quote > what I said there: > >> The conclusion of the paper is that ZFS does not protect against in-memory >> corruption, and thus can't provide end-to-end integrity in the presence of >> memory errors. I am not arguing against that at all; obviously you'll want >> ECC on your ZFS-based server if you value data integrity -- just as you >> would if you were using any other file system. That doesn't really have >> anything to do with the claim that ZFS specifically makes lack of ECC more >> likely to cause total data loss, though. > > The sections you quote below basically say that while ZFS offers good > protection against on-disk corruption, it does *not* effectively protect you > against memory errors. Or, put another way, the authors are basically finding > that despite all the FS-level checksumming, ZFS does not render ECC memory > unnecessary (as one might perhaps naively expect). No claim is being made > that memory errors affect ZFS more than other filesystems. Yes. Just like anything else, end-to-end data integrity is needed. So until people write apps that self-check everything, there is a possibility that something you trust [1] can fail. As it happens, only the PC market demands no ECC. TANSTAAFL. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug -- richard -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "zfs-macos" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to zfs-macos+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.