Re: what is our answer to ZFS?

[Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>]

On Monday 21 November 2005 18:45, Pavel Machek wrote:
> Hi!
> > Sun is proposing it can predict what storage layout will be efficient for
> > as yet unheard of quantities of data, with unknown access patterns, at
> > least a couple decades from now.  It's also proposing that data
> > compression and checksumming are the filesystem's job.  Hands up anybody
> > who spots conflicting trends here already?  Who thinks the 128 bit
> > requirement came from marketing rather than the engineers?
>
> Actually, if you are storing information in single protons, I'd say
> you _need_ checksumming :-).

You need error correcting codes at the media level.  A molecular storage 
system like this would probably look a lot more like flash or dram than it 
would magnetic media.  (For one thing, I/O bandwidth and seek times become a 
serious bottleneck with high density single point of access systems.)

> [I actually agree with Sun here, not trusting disk is good idea. At
> least you know kernel panic/oops/etc can't be caused by bit corruption on
> the disk.]

But who said the filesystem was the right level to do this at?

Rob