[Tfug] Crappy USB LVM/Software RAID10 performance?

[Zack Williams]

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 11:54 PM, Eric Gearhart <eric at nixwizard.net> wrote:
> Is anyone else reading this thread and thinking "ZFS or btrfs for the win!"

Yes. *glances at the opensolaris box under the desk*

The problem with traditional RAID and ever increasing disk sizes is
that with the 1-2TB drives we've got now, the bit error rate threshold
can be easily met during a standard rebuild, resulting in silent data
corruption. ZFS and btrfs have end to end checksums on all data going
on and off the drives, thus are able to detect (and repair, if
possible) such a problem.

ZFS has been in production for a few years now, compared to btrfs
which hasn't even finalized it's on-disk data format.

That said, ZFS is proving very difficult to port to other OS's, as it
makes some very unusual demands on how their kernels work (it wants
>4GB kernel memory for caching, as one example).  If you want to use
it practically, you need to jump to some form of solaris.

> I need to either get a Solaris box going or get Linux with btrfs going
> to start playing with the next-gen filesystems...

Opensolaris 2009.06 is supposed to come out on Monday :)

- Zack