On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 05:01:15PM +0200, dick hoogendijk wrote: > On Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:44:36 -0400 > Kyle McDonald <kmcdon...@egenera.com> wrote: > > ... then it seems like a shame (or a waste?) not to equally > > protect the data both before it's given to ZFS for writing, and after > > ZFS reads it back and returns it to you. > > But that was not the question. > The question was: [quote] "My question is: is there any technical > reason, in ZFS's design, that makes it particularly important for ZFS > to require ECC RAM?"
The only thing I can think of is this: if a cosmic ray flips a bit in memory holding a ZFS transaction that's already had all its checksums computed, but hasn't hit disk yet, then you'll have a checksum verification failure later when you read back the affected file (or directory). Using ECC memory avoids that. You still have the processor to worry about though. Nico -- _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
