ZFS regimen: scrub, scrub, scrub and scrub again.

[Nikolay Denev]

On Jan 24, 2013, at 4:24 PM, Wojciech Puchar <wojtek at wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl> wrote:
>> 
> Except it is on paper reliability.

This "on paper" reliability saved my ass numerous times.
For example I had one home NAS server machine with flaky SATA controller that would not detect one of the four drives from time to time on reboot.
This made my pool degraded several times, and even rebooting with let's say disk4 failed to a situation that disk3 is failed did not corrupt any data.
I don't think this is possible with any other open source FS, let alone hardware RAID that would drop the whole array because of this.
I have never ever personally lost any data on ZFS. Yes, the performance is another topic, and you must know what you are doing, and what is your
usage pattern, but from reliability standpoint, to me ZFS looks more durable than anything else.

P.S.: My home NAS is running freebsd-CURRENT with ZFS from the first version available. Several drives died, two times the pool was expanded
by replacing all drives one by one and resilvered, no single byte lost.