"There is a discussion at osnews.com about a simple question: "Should ZFS Have a fsck Tool?". The answer is simple: No. I could stop now, as this answer is pretty obvious when you work a while with ZFS, but i want to explain my position. And i want to ask a different question at the end."
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Member since:2008-10-16
Tony, this has nothing to do with Sun hardware snobbery ... i'm using several el-cheapo disks with plain-standardard onboard/PCIe SATA-controllers.
We talked about failure modes, that are the consequence of buggy implementation. And as data is the most important stuff you have, it's not snobbery, it's a necessity to throw such components into the next trash bin ... like a floppy disk with a fingerprint on it. And this is even more important, when you don't have a filesystem with end-to-end integrity like ZFS, as you can't check if your data is still correct.
I threw out every USB drive from my setup: It's just plain eSATA for all my external enclosure needs (no protocol conversion/less problems). I'm just using USB hard drives as a bigger floppy .... but i would never place important data on them alone.
Member since:2008-10-16
One additional point: One ZFS developer once said, that he would like to integrate a function, that rejects devices with such bugs in their implementation. The problem is just, that's hard to detect that programmatically. I have the same opinion. Data is the most precious asset i have on my server, everything else is replaceable.
Edited 2009-11-08 20:01 UTC
Member since:
2005-07-06
[quote]At first you should to throw the sub-sub-substandard hardware in the next available trash bin after copying the the data to a storage subsystem of better quality and wiping the old disks. [/quote]
I thought we were done with Sun hardware snobbery.
Obviously, if we're talking mission critical data, a coupon run to Best Buy for some deals on disks isn't going to cut it.
But the rest of us? Is your argument is that we should buy only SaS drives or 10,000 RPM Enterprise-grade SATA drives with redundant battery-memory controllers to run our home rigs, media servers, laptops? That's not a solution. That's a cop-out.