On Sep 23, 2010, at 9:08 AM, Dick Hoogendijk wrote: > On 23-9-2010 16:34, Frank Middleton wrote: > > > 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... > > And about what SUN systems are you thinking for 'home use' ?
At one time, due to market pricing pressure, Sun actually sold a server without ECC. Bad idea, didn't last long. Unfortunately, the PeeCee market is just too cheap to value ECC. So they take the risk and hope for the best. > The likeliness of memory failures might be much higher than becoming a > millionair, but in the years past I have never had one. And my home sytems > are rather cheap. Mind you, not the cheapest, but rather cheap. I do buy good > memory though. So, to me, with a good backup I feel rather safe using ZFS. I > also had it running for quite some time on a 32bits machine and that also > worked out fine. Part of the difference is the expected use. For PCs which are only used 8 hours per day, 40 hours per week, rebooting regularly, the risk of transient main memory errors is low. For servers running 24x7, rebooting once a year, the risk is much higher. > The fact that a perfectly good file can not be read because of a bad checksum > is a design failure imho. There should be an option to overrule this > behaviour of ZFS. It isn't a perfectly good file once it has been corrupted. But there are some ways to get at the file contents. Remember, the blocks are checksummed, not the file. So if a bad block is in the file, you can skip over it. http://blogs.sun.com/relling/entry/holy_smokes_a_holey_file http://blogs.sun.com/relling/entry/dd_tricks_for_holey_files http://blogs.sun.com/relling/entry/more_on_holey_files -- richard -- OpenStorage Summit, October 25-27, Palo Alto, CA http://nexenta-summit2010.eventbrite.com ZFS and performance consulting http://www.RichardElling.com _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
