Re: btrfs and ECC RAM

cwillu
2014-01-18T00:49:40Z

On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 6:23 PM, Ian Hinder <ian.hinder@aei.mpg.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have been reading a lot of articles online about the dangers of using ZFS with non-ECC RAM. Specifically, the fact that when good data is read from disk and compared with its checksum, a RAM error can cause the read data to be incorrect, causing a checksum failure, and the bad data might now be written back to the disk in an attempt to correct it, corrupting it in the process. This would be exacerbated by a scrub, which could run through all your data and potentially corrupt it. There is a strong current of opinion that using ZFS without ECC RAM is "suicide for your data".

That sounds entirely silly: a scrub will only write data to the disk
that has actually passed a checksum. In order for that to corrupt
something on disk, you'd have to have a perfect storm of correct and
corrupt reads, and in every such case thta I can think of, you'd be
worse off without checksums than if you had them.