4 ms·
ZFS boards really encourage you to use ECC because one of the nominal features of ZFS, "end-to-end checksumming", is not quite as useful if you have a point bet
by rincebrain 10y ago
ZFS boards really encourage you to use ECC because one of the nominal features of ZFS, "end-to-end checksumming", is not quite as useful if you have a point between ends where it won't notice silent data corruption (e.g. a bad stick of non-ECC RAM).
ZFS will notice, depending on _when_ the munging happened (if it was mangled after it got to RAM but before ZFS checksummed it, it obviously can't), but that's (primarily) why ZFS boards often tell you not to do that.
- erkkie 10y agoNot only that, but I believe a bad checksum can also cause a cascade to "fix the data", causing further corruption.
- the_why_of_y 10y agoFor that to happen, you would need a bad checksum and the corresponding data block to be corrupted in such a way that the corrupted data block checksums to the corrupted checksum. Given that the checksum is 256-bit, the scariest I'd call that is "possible in theory".