On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 9:20 AM, Simon 'corecode' Schubert <[email protected]> wrote: > You're assuming fail-stop errors. If it is a sneaking bit error or > something else, it won't notice.
Ever since ZFS was announced I've wondered how often this actually happens. So far I've only heard of one anecdote of silent readable corruption which was caused by a faulty power supply. Never in all my years of cheap disks and cheaper motherboards and power supplies have I had a checksum on a file go bad, and I store checksums on almost everything. I did once have some live ext3 corruption but come on, it's ext3, and that too could be explained by my power supply which later took out two motherboards before its ritual suicide. Even then fsck.ext3 returned the fs to consistency and told me exactly what was damaged. I'm just curious how much the average developer / admin would benefit from ZFS. It seems it's good for really long term storage, since it'll heal over bad blocks if scrubbed regularly. But how often do silent bad blocks even occur? -- Dmitri Nikulin Centre for Synchrotron Science Monash University Victoria 3800, Australia
