On 09/23/10 03:01, Ian Collins wrote:
So, I wonder - what's the recommendation, or rather, experience as far
as home users are concerned? Is it "safe enough" now do use ZFS on
non-ECC-RAM systems (if backups are around)?
It's as safe as running any other OS.
The big difference is ZFS will tell you when there's a corruption. Most
users of other systems are blissfully unaware of data corruption!
This runs you into the possibility of perfectly good files becoming inaccessible
due to bad checksums being written to all the mirrors. As Richard Elling
wrote some time ago in "[zfs-discuss] You really do need ECC RAM", see
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/%7Ebianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf. There
were a couple of zfs-discuss threads quite recently about memory problems
causing serious issues. Personally, I wouldn't trust any valuable data to any
system without ECC, regardless of OS and file systems. For home use, used
Suns are available at ridiculously low prices and they seem to be much better
engineered than your typical PC. Memory failures are much more likely than
winning the pick 6 lotto...
FWIW Richard helped me diagnose a problem with checksum failures on
mirrored drives a while back and it turned out to be the CPU itself getting
the actual checksum wrong /only on one particular file/, and even then only
when the ambient temperature was high. So ZFS is good at ferreting out
obscure hardware problems :-).
Cheers -- Frank
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