4 ms·
Anecdote: I once lost a lot of files over a period of ~two years on a desktop PC running ZFS with bad non-ECC RAM. I figured out what was going on after a bunch
by Lammy 5y ago
Anecdote: I once lost a lot of files over a period of ~two years on a desktop PC running ZFS with bad non-ECC RAM. I figured out what was going on after a bunch of audible corrupt blips kept appearing in all my favorite FLAC rips as they got mapped into the bad memory, checksummed against the contents still on disk, and written back "corrected" as far as ZFS was concerned. There's a better (i.e. not by me) write-up of it in the OP of this thread under "What happens when non-ECC RAM goes bad in a ZFS system?": https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-ram-and-zfs.15449/ https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-ram...
- lambdaba 5y agoThank you, this is a perfect illustration and one of the scenarios I feared around keeping data long-term, though I was thinking about disk errors and such. Sidenote I seem to have experienced Cunningham's Law for the first time semi-consciously, as I was aware my claim is most probably wrong. Still, I wonder if data corruption is a more common scenario rather than crashing, because ever since I use Linux I don't recall experiencing many crashes I couldn't attribute to a driver issue or known instability in the software I used, especially on compatible hardware. Windows days were another story... But maybe the memory modules were worse back then and perhaps having less memory made it more likely to crash?