This is an article which discusses the increase in storage capacity while performance and hard error rates have not improved significantly in years, and what this means for protecting data in large storage systems. "The concept of parity-based RAID (levels 3, 5 and 6) is now pretty old in technological terms, and the technology's limitations will become pretty clear in the not-too-distant future â" and are probably obvious to some users already. In my opinion, RAID-6 is a reliability Band Aid for RAID-5, and going from one parity drive to two is simply delaying the inevitable."
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Member since:2007-07-27
Maybe if you are a CEO for a company with a critical system, worth of billions of dollars or of thousands of lifes, you are willing to take any measure to minimize the risc of loosing data? And, ZFS doesnt require extra, specialized hardware. Just a Sata controller card with no raid functionality + 7200 rpm SATA discs.
RAID - aRrAy of Inexpensive Discs(?). With ZFS it becomes true. A good HW raid card costs much. What happens if the vendor goes bankrupt? Where to find a new HW card? You are locked in.
ZFS code is open and you can do whatever you want with it. ZFS is future proof. And it doesnt cost anything. Move your discs to a Mac OS X computer, or FreeBSD computer, or Solaris SPARC, or Solaris x86 and write "zpool import" and you are done with the migration. All data is stored endian neutral.
To me it is a no brainer why not use ZFS. It is better, safer, easy to administer and free. Ive heard to create a raid with Linux and LVM takes like 30 commands. With ZFS you write "zpool create raidz1 disc0 disc1 disc2 disc3" and you are done. No formatting. Copy your data immediately. No fsck exists. All data is always online.
But these great advantages that ZFS gives, is nothing new with SUNs technology. DTrace is also as good as ZFS. And Niagara Sparc. Zones. etc. And they are all open tech. And GOOD tech.
Here is a Linux guy builds his first ZFS storage server. Well researched and a good read:
http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/
Member since:2007-03-26
If you're going to talk like that, then why worry about anything? Except maybe your job because you get fired after all your data is lost to corruption
Member since:
2007-01-13
To put things into perspective the probability that you will die within the next year is far greater than 0.01. I wouldn't be worried about a few corrupted files within that context.