3 ms·

This contrasts with the ZFS team who said they started seeing disk errors as soon as they switched to ZFS.

lilyball 3y ago
Apple system volumes are stored on the internal SSDs sold by Apple as part of the system. It's reasonable to believe that these SSDs are higher quality and more reliable than many disks used with Linux machines.
sillywalk 3y ago
Cool, the OpenBSD tedu, thanks for doas.. etc. Also, is there a post about this zfs on apple silicon error thing?
xoa 3y ago
As well as hardware control including their own controller which may implement more ECC under the hood (and I'm 95% sure I remember that part of the reasoning for lack of full checksumming in APFS was "well our hardware doesn't have those errors"), 9GB also isn't actually that much even over tens of millions of systems. ZFS is used with an absolutely massive variety of hardware from expensive to cheap, with petabyte levels of data (or more at this point) in single installs. I've seen some real weirdness with APFS on non-Apple storage devices, and corruption crept into some of the data stored on my Macs somewhere in the decade before I started using ZFS (images I know were fine in the 00s with data errors I found much later, there is probably other stuff but of course the whole problem is that I don't know and have no great automated way to find out). This isn't dunking on Apple putting together a reliable product in their own walled garden using their own full array of vertically integrated options at all, but at the same time the ZFS team can be entirely correct given a very different problem space.
upon_drumhead 3y ago
I run a decently large zfs setup (in the single digit petabyte range) and I have never actually had a spinning disk trigger a zfs checksum issue that wasn't shortly followed up by the disk failing completely in the next week or so. And this is multiple years of this pattern. While it has to happen occasionally, it does seem to be a pretty rare event in my experience. Drive actually failing are way more likely to happen it seems.

Apple system volumes are stored on the internal SSDs sold by Apple as part of the system. It's reasonable to believe that these SSDs are higher quality and more reliable than many disks used with Linux machines.

sillywalk 3y ago

Cool, the OpenBSD tedu, thanks for doas.. etc. Also, is there a post about this zfs on apple silicon error thing?

xoa 3y ago

As well as hardware control including their own controller which may implement more ECC under the hood (and I'm 95% sure I remember that part of the reasoning for lack of full checksumming in APFS was "well our hardware doesn't have those errors"), 9GB also isn't actually that much even over tens of millions of systems. ZFS is used with an absolutely massive variety of hardware from expensive to cheap, with petabyte levels of data (or more at this point) in single installs. I've seen some real weirdness with APFS on non-Apple storage devices, and corruption crept into some of the data stored on my Macs somewhere in the decade before I started using ZFS (images I know were fine in the 00s with data errors I found much later, there is probably other stuff but of course the whole problem is that I don't know and have no great automated way to find out). This isn't dunking on Apple putting together a reliable product in their own walled garden using their own full array of vertically integrated options at all, but at the same time the ZFS team can be entirely correct given a very different problem space.

upon_drumhead 3y ago

I run a decently large zfs setup (in the single digit petabyte range) and I have never actually had a spinning disk trigger a zfs checksum issue that wasn't shortly followed up by the disk failing completely in the next week or so. And this is multiple years of this pattern. While it has to happen occasionally, it does seem to be a pretty rare event in my experience. Drive actually failing are way more likely to happen it seems.