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Traditional filesystems will let files just sit on the hard drive, untouched. ZFS is a lot more active... checksumming and caching mean that important informat
by milcron 9y ago
Traditional filesystems will let files just sit on the hard drive, untouched.
ZFS is a lot more active... checksumming and caching mean that important information is spending time in RAM. It's not good if that information gets corrupted.
- rightos 9y agoDoesn't ZFS perform checksumming and error correction on that data to make sure that memory or disk issues don't get affected by corruption? I thought that was a main reason to use it.
- milcron 9y agoWell right. It protects against silent bitrot on the hard drives. But it does this by caching and checksumming in RAM, so now you need to defend against bitflips in RAM. It's not that ZFS without ECC is completely unsafe... it's just not as safe as it could be. ECC RAM becomes the next biggest concern once you've addressed on-disk bitrot.
- Dylan16807 9y agoChecksumming doesn't make data loss worse. ZFS doesn't cache in any special way, or more than your typical filesystem. Lack of ECC just lessens the benefits of ZFS, it doesn't exacerbate any problems.