Thanks for the response. I think JRS's account has some serious issues with the writer conflating hardware failure (stuck bits, unreadable blocks, etc) with ran

Thanks for the response. I think JRS's account has some serious issues with the writer conflating hardware failure (stuck bits, unreadable blocks, etc) with random error that is more common and inevitable, not to mention undetectable in principle without ECC[0]. Bit flip has been shown to cause both data loss/corruption as well as filesystem failure in ZFS[1]. The scenario they presented in the paper is probably less relevant for a home lab where most data are accessed infrequently and the real chance of catastrophic failure is probably below 0.1% per bit flip event, but the risk is real and will only get higher as storage densities go up. People on FreeNAS forum tend to play on the extreme side of caution - after all if one is willing to cut corners on hardware other unsafe practices will probably follow, hence it is better to make it clear that certain acts are not worth the risk. [0]:DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf [1]: End-to-end Data Integrity for File Systems: A ZFS Case Study http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/zfs-corruption-fast10.pdf http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/zfs-corruption...