scott.marlowe@xxxxxxxxx ("Scott Marlowe") writes: > I assume hardware failure rates are zero, until there is one. Then I > restore from a known good backup. compressed file systems have little > to do with that. There's a way that compressed filesystems might *help* with a risk factor, here... By reducing the number of disk drives required to hold the data, you may be reducing the risk of enough of them failing to invalidate the RAID array. If a RAID array is involved, where *some* failures may be silently coped with, I could readily see this *improving* reliability, in most cases. This is at least *vaguely* similar to the way that aircraft have moved from requiring rather large numbers of engines for cross-Atlantic trips to requiring just 2. In the distant past, the engines were sufficiently unreliable that you wanted to have at least 4 in order to be reasonably assured that you could limp along with at least 2. With increases in engine reliability, it's now considered preferable to have *just* 2 engines, as having 4 means doubling the risk of there being a failure. Disk drives and jet engines are hardly the same thing, but I suspect the analogy fits. -- let name="cbbrowne" and tld="linuxfinances.info" in String.concat "@" [name;tld];; http://linuxfinances.info/info/lisp.html Why do they put Braille dots on the keypad of the drive-up ATM? -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general