2013-01-10, 23:36
@PANiCnz - yes, I agree.
The parity-based RAID has served me well over the years, but I was looking for something more powerful to replace it. Even now with my soon-to-be-decommissioned Ubuntu server I see the odd SATA error in dmesg and wonder what if any issues that's causing with my data.
I don't need to worry about that with ZFS. I had several drives drop in and out while sorting out initial dud HDD's issues on this unit and even after all of that scrub and md5 check's all turned up 100% solid.
Biggest entry barrier I see to ZFS is finding the OS to run it. This is my first dip into BSD and spent lots of time researching it + of course all / best compatible hardware.
It's been worth it though and I *hope* to get several years of reliable service out of this new box.
Next box I *may* turn back to Linux if BTRFS ever gets stable and feature-competitive, but full speed ahead with ZFS for the foreseeable future.
Another story for the crickets:
In current Ubuntu-based server I had bad RAM in Dec 2011 and then a failed HDD in the RAID5 array June 2012. mdadm happily rebuilt array once new drive added and everything looked fine. Upon next reboot, however, I ran into complete blockage trying to remount the ext4 filesystem on the RAID5 aray due to 'bad superblock'....fsck just completely freaked out too since apparently ALL of the superblocks were frakked.
What I think happened here is the something along the lines of the RAID 'write-hole' issue...the bad RAM wrote a bunch of crap parity stripes in Dec and when array rebuilt after failed drive in June it completely hosed the filesystem.
I should be able to avoid another issue like this with ZFS due to the enhanced data checksums, etc. I also went with the cheapo Xeon + ECC RAM as well in the new build for extra protection.
The parity-based RAID has served me well over the years, but I was looking for something more powerful to replace it. Even now with my soon-to-be-decommissioned Ubuntu server I see the odd SATA error in dmesg and wonder what if any issues that's causing with my data.
I don't need to worry about that with ZFS. I had several drives drop in and out while sorting out initial dud HDD's issues on this unit and even after all of that scrub and md5 check's all turned up 100% solid.
Biggest entry barrier I see to ZFS is finding the OS to run it. This is my first dip into BSD and spent lots of time researching it + of course all / best compatible hardware.
It's been worth it though and I *hope* to get several years of reliable service out of this new box.
Next box I *may* turn back to Linux if BTRFS ever gets stable and feature-competitive, but full speed ahead with ZFS for the foreseeable future.
Another story for the crickets:
In current Ubuntu-based server I had bad RAM in Dec 2011 and then a failed HDD in the RAID5 array June 2012. mdadm happily rebuilt array once new drive added and everything looked fine. Upon next reboot, however, I ran into complete blockage trying to remount the ext4 filesystem on the RAID5 aray due to 'bad superblock'....fsck just completely freaked out too since apparently ALL of the superblocks were frakked.
What I think happened here is the something along the lines of the RAID 'write-hole' issue...the bad RAM wrote a bunch of crap parity stripes in Dec and when array rebuilt after failed drive in June it completely hosed the filesystem.
I should be able to avoid another issue like this with ZFS due to the enhanced data checksums, etc. I also went with the cheapo Xeon + ECC RAM as well in the new build for extra protection.
