On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Joe Koberg wrote: > May I suggest a ZFS based filesystem? > > FreeBSD, Solaris, OpenSolaris, and Linux via beta 3rd-party driver, > support this advanced filesystem. I would trust Solaris or FreeBSD the mo= st. > > Every ZFS metadata block contains a checksum of the blocks it > references. =A0Every time ZFS reads a block, it verifies the checksum. If > it's not right, it reads the copy from the {mirror/raid} and rewrites > the original block (thus self-repairing). This is far more advanced than > simply checking if the IO channel returned a read error, and then trying > it on the other IO channel (RAID-1). Even if the IO channel returns no > errors, the data could still be corrupted. In fact, a standard hardware > RAID will be happy to copy corruption from one disk to another in the > name of "recovery", as long as the disks don't report read errors. =A0ZFS > can identify incorrect data coming off the disk, something a hardware > RAID controller or a software emulation of a RAID controller cannot. > > ZFS supports volumes of many mirrored sets (my preference), or groups of > RAID with single, double, or triple parity. (Meaning one, two, or three > drives can fail). > > ZFS also supports real scrubbing (reading every allocated block and > comparing it to its checksum)... Which done regularly, will identify and > self-repair disk errors in a very reliable way. =A0It also supports > in-place growth, zero-cost snapshots, replication, etc, etc.... > > On Solaris it supports transparent kernel-level Windows file service > via CIFS/SMB, with ACLs et al. > > Joe Koberg, AE5NE > joe@osoft.us > That sounds good. So you're saying go with a ZFS system on software RAID rather than hardware RAID? How do you feel about btrfs? --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .