Odd file system corruption in ZFS pool

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2012-Apr-26 13:44:52 +1000, Andrew Reilly <areilly at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
>On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 08:58:41AM -0500, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
>> It 
>> is important to use a system which supports ECC memory to assure that 
>> data is not corrupted in memory since zfs does not defend against 
>> that.
>
>Not reasonable for an inexpensive home file/e-mail/whatever
>server, IMO.  Well, none of the mini-ITX motherboards I saw
>touted ECC as an available option.

It's a tradeoff.  ECC does increase the cost but how valuable is
your data?  I run ECC on my home server because that closes a
hole in the end-to-end checking.

Building a system out of server-grade parts is one option - though
(apart from the RAM), the parts tend to be more expensive.  Re-using
a second-hand server is another option - though they will use more
power that a system built with current-generation pars.

Building a system using SOHO-grade parts is trickier.  The CPU is easy
- basically all desktop AMD CPUs support ECC RAM.  Motherboards are
trickier - support for ECC is generally well hidden - Asus & Gigabyte
are the only vendors that seem to advertise ECC support (though they
still don't seem to offer it on all motherboards).  The downside of
non-server motherboards is thah they generally only support unbuffered
RAM and only have 2-4 DIMM slots.  Unbuffered ECC RAM is currently
only economical up to 4GB DIMMs (8GB DIMMs exist but are outrageously
expensive) - this limits you to ~16GB, which isn't extravagant when
you are using ZFS.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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