[geeks] Solaris 10 / OpenSolaris bits to be in next version of OSX

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Wed, 9 Aug 2006, Phil Stracchino wrote:

>> The added bonus to the AIX approach is that you get this for -all-
>> slices, including paging slices.  It's Nice when you can replace a
>> device holding your page slice without rebooting the system.
>
> But it appears that to do so, you have to tell the system to allocate
> redundant copies of every block.

Only because AIX doesn't have RAID-5 in the base operating system.

>> The more sinister side of this is how Sun is selling it.  "Silent
>> data corruption"?  What in the world is that supposed to mean?
>
> You've never had a shaky disk start throwing random read errors?

Not in such a way that my RAID couldn't handle it, no.

> I think what they're saying is that their RAID-Z can automatically
> detect, and transparently handle, read errors on the media that do not
> actually involve complete hardware failure.  In short, anyone's RAID
> can handle a failed disk, but ZFS can handle it when the disk is just
> starting to go bad and is dropping bits, and identify exactly which
> disk block it was that returned bad data even if the disk's ECC didn't
> catch or flag it.

I'd have to double-check on this, but I'm not really aware of -any-
vendor who does parity-based RAID without checksums.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke    )   "A man who never dreams goes slowly mad."
Elgin, TX           (      --Thomas Dolby, "Valley of the Mind's Eye"