From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail-ie0-f175.google.com ([209.85.223.175]:58855 "EHLO mail-ie0-f175.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752638AbaAQUkz (ORCPT ); Fri, 17 Jan 2014 15:40:55 -0500 Received: by mail-ie0-f175.google.com with SMTP id ar20so1280364iec.20 for ; Fri, 17 Jan 2014 12:40:54 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <52D99554.2060006@gmail.com> Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2014 15:40:52 -0500 From: Austin S Hemmelgarn MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "valleysmail-lol5@yahoo.de" , "linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org" Subject: Re: drawbacks of non-ECC RAM References: <1389983615.90027.YahooMailNeo@web172606.mail.ir2.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <1389983615.90027.YahooMailNeo@web172606.mail.ir2.yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Sender: linux-btrfs-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On 01/17/2014 01:33 PM, valleysmail-lol5@yahoo.de wrote: > > > I'd like to know if there are drawbacks in using btrfs with non-ECC > RAM instead of using ext4 with non-ECC RAM. I know that some > features of btrfs may rely on ECC RAM but is the chance of data > corruption or even a damaged filesystem higher than when i use ext4 > instead of btrfs? I want to know this because i would like to use > the snapshot feature of btrfs and ext4 does not support that. I > will not use btrfs for fixing silent data corruption nor for using > RAID like features or encryption. ZFS however checks files in the > background (even if i don't want) and if it thinks there is an > error it will fix it and i cannot disable this feature. So errors > in RAM may corrupt my files or even more. > > > If you have some information regarding this topic or some good > links i would be very happy! =) Theoretically, there should be little difference, and it should in fact be slightly safer to use BTRFS than EXT4 in general because the data structures for BTRFS are slightly more resilient, and it is smart enough to check the on-disk data if stuff in memory looks damaged. AFAIK, none of the features in BTRFS depend on using ECC RAM, and BTRFS's error recovery is entirely independent of whether the system RAM is ECC or not. The aren't really any BTRFS specific drawbacks to using non-ECC ram. If you're really that paranoid about data corruption, you really should be using both ECC RAM and a RAID setup. Unless your hardware is damaged (or you plan on sending your computer to space or running it near a poorly shielded nuclear reactor), the chance of data in ram not matching that on-disk is very low. As an entirely secondary thought, BTRFS is almost always faster on commodity hardware than ZFS. ZFS was designed to be used on high-end server systems with dozens of disks on multiple RAID controllers, so it's a lot less efficient in most other use cases than BTRFS.