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> PS: And was it ECC RAM? This myth seriously needs to die. ZFS does not care one whit what kind of RAM you use, any more than my other type of filesystem does

> PS: And was it ECC RAM? This myth seriously needs to die. ZFS does not care one whit what kind of RAM you use, any more than my other type of filesystem does. Who puts ECC RAM in a small, low-power, embedded-style system like an RPi? It makes no sense.

X86BSD 9y ago
It makes sense to this degree only, if you DONT use ECC no matter where you are using ZFS you are introducing potential checksum errors in the data path. ECC is not that much more than normal ram. To me it makes no sense to run ZFS even if in some tiny home NAS and leave the data path vulnerable to corruption of any kind. Why bother with ZFS at all if you don’t want complete protection? That’s just bizarre.
- tmikaeld 9y ago
  This, same reason i don't understand why scaleway don't use ECC RAM on production servers. It's that important, I've seen corrupt RAM write bad data too many times and I don't even have thousands of servers...
- empthought 9y ago
  No it’s not. I might want instant rollback on large databases on a development machine. Others might want transparent compression and send/receive on a small device. Neither has anything to do with “complete protection” yet both are easy to accomplish with ZFS. There are a whole slew of reasons to run ZFS outside of mass redundant storage with “complete protection.” The decision to use ECC or not has nothing to do with ZFS. You may as well ask someone who is building an ext4 file server machine whether they “used ECC RAM”; it’s just as relevant. Yet no one does that for EXT4 and they do it all the time for ZFS, because of one stupid post on the FreeNAS forums that has been roundly debunked a half-dozen times.
Fnoord 9y ago
> Who puts ECC RAM in a small, low-power, embedded-style system like an RPi? It makes no sense. Well, you can't put it in a RPi or smartphone or Synology if it isn't there in the first place because its soldered. But if you build yourself a FreeNAS DIY or if you buy big iron for your company then why not. You still get other benefits from something like ZFS w/o ECC RAM though (imagine CoW; useful on pretty much any computer), but with less certainty.
- empthought 9y ago
  Without ECC, you get no less certainty than any other filesystem. It should not factor into discussions of when it is appropriate to use ZFS vs another filesystem.
  - Fnoord 9y ago
    Less certainty than if you'd have ECC RAM. If you can afford it, and you're using ZFS, you should seriously consider ECC RAM.
    - empthought 9y ago
      You aren’t getting my point. “If you can afford it, you should seriously consider ECC RAM” is the proper advice. ZFS has nothing to do with it.

X86BSD 9y ago

It makes sense to this degree only, if you DONT use ECC no matter where you are using ZFS you are introducing potential checksum errors in the data path. ECC is not that much more than normal ram. To me it makes no sense to run ZFS even if in some tiny home NAS and leave the data path vulnerable to corruption of any kind. Why bother with ZFS at all if you don’t want complete protection? That’s just bizarre.

tmikaeld 9y ago
This, same reason i don't understand why scaleway don't use ECC RAM on production servers. It's that important, I've seen corrupt RAM write bad data too many times and I don't even have thousands of servers...
empthought 9y ago
No it’s not. I might want instant rollback on large databases on a development machine. Others might want transparent compression and send/receive on a small device. Neither has anything to do with “complete protection” yet both are easy to accomplish with ZFS. There are a whole slew of reasons to run ZFS outside of mass redundant storage with “complete protection.” The decision to use ECC or not has nothing to do with ZFS. You may as well ask someone who is building an ext4 file server machine whether they “used ECC RAM”; it’s just as relevant. Yet no one does that for EXT4 and they do it all the time for ZFS, because of one stupid post on the FreeNAS forums that has been roundly debunked a half-dozen times.

Fnoord 9y ago

> Who puts ECC RAM in a small, low-power, embedded-style system like an RPi? It makes no sense. Well, you can't put it in a RPi or smartphone or Synology if it isn't there in the first place because its soldered. But if you build yourself a FreeNAS DIY or if you buy big iron for your company then why not. You still get other benefits from something like ZFS w/o ECC RAM though (imagine CoW; useful on pretty much any computer), but with less certainty.

empthought 9y ago
Without ECC, you get no less certainty than any other filesystem. It should not factor into discussions of when it is appropriate to use ZFS vs another filesystem.
- Fnoord 9y ago
  Less certainty than if you'd have ECC RAM. If you can afford it, and you're using ZFS, you should seriously consider ECC RAM.
  - empthought 9y ago
    You aren’t getting my point. “If you can afford it, you should seriously consider ECC RAM” is the proper advice. ZFS has nothing to do with it.