[Discuss] SSD drives vs. Mechanical drives

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 1:09 PM, Richard Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> wrote:
> Bill Bogstad wrote:
>> And checksums can be incorrectly generated/verified by any hardware
>> at any time.I claim that 100% data integrity is impossible. I don't
>> think even ZFS can guarantee 100% data integrity with the right set
>> of bizarre hardware failures in the CPU/RAM of the computer.
>
> ZFS and Btrfs can guarantee 100% data integrity when writes are atomic
> (drives honor sync commands) and ECC RAM is in use and sufficient
> redundant data is available for reconstruction when errors are detected.
> I leave it to the reader to read the ZFS and Btrfs whitepapers that
> explain precisely why they can make these guarantees.

ECC is not 100%.   Nor does it protect against transient CPU/memory
cache errors during
checksum computation.  If you are saying that ZFS can then I will happily read
any whitepaper that you like bcause they are doing some kind of awesome.

Bill Bogstad