I'm looking at alternatives to ZFS since it still has some time to go for large scale deployment as a kernel-level file system (and brtfs has years to go). I am running into problems with silent data corruption with large deployments of disks. Currently no hardware raid vendor supports T10 DIF (which even if supported would only work w/ SAS/FC drives anyway) nor does read parity checking.
I am hoping that either there is a way that I don't know of to enable mdadm to read the data plus p+q parity blocks for every request and compare them for accuracy (simlar to what you need to do for a scrub but /ALWAYS/) or have the functionality added as an option.
With the current large capacity drives we have today getting bit errors is quite common (I have some scripts that I do complete file checks every two weeks across 50TB arrays and come up with errros every month). I'm looking at expanding to 200-300TB volumes shortly so the problem will only get that much more frequent. Being able to check the data against parity will be able to find/notify and correct errors at read time before they get to user space. This fixes bit rot as well as torn/wild reads/writes and mitigates transmission issues.
I searched the list but couldn't find this benig discussed before, is this possible?
Steve Costaras stevecs@xxxxxxxxxx -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
