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I think the assumed issues here are the long rebuild times and the expectation of an additional failure happening during the rebuild which could then trigger an

I think the assumed issues here are the long rebuild times and the expectation of an additional failure happening during the rebuild which could then trigger another disk error. Then the entire array of data would be taken offline and possibly corrupted. I have build many RAID5/6 arrays and have rarely lost any data, but I am leery and now and tend to just stick with smaller RAID 1 or 10's due to the large size of current disks. We really need native ZFS (BTRFS?) on everything now. Data should be automatically distributed to multiple disks and the file system should be able to guarantee via checksum the data read is what I wrote.

venus 12y ago
Are any consumer NAS that implement ZFS even available? Sounds like ZFS's proactive sector sweeps across all managed drives would handily solve the problem the article raises with conventional RAID.
- lmz 12y ago
  iXsystems sells the 4-bay FreeNAS mini on Amazon: http://www.ixsystems.com/storage/freenas/ http://www.ixsystems.com/storage/freenas/ That probably counts as "consumer".
- mitchty 12y ago
  So I built a zfs raid nas box with 6x3Tb drives. I have it resilver every 2 weeks. So far, NOTHING has failed checksums for almost 2 years. So while the maths behind a 3-4 tb drive returning incorrect data I'm sure is technically correct, I've not seen issues. If you want "proof" i can dump out zpool status/info/log/etc to show i'm not lying. Note the pool is ~50% in use so its not a great example. Also its raidz2 (raid6) so not a direct comparison. I also bought each drive from different lots to hopefully ensure if a drive failed i'd have 2ish days to get a replacement.