ZFS is Perfectly Safe on Hardware RAID
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@tjatwood109 said in ZFS is Perfectly Safe on Hardware RAID:
I was looking at ZFS precisely for checksums to identify bit rot.
This is essentially pointless. Bit rot, while real, is a trivial concern that is primarily promoted by the ZFS community to produce feature that need not exist to attempt to "sell" ZFS as if it magically handles bit rot dramatically better than other options.
In the real world, ZFS is great, but first bit rot isn't a major concern and second, almost every platform handles bit rot.
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@tjatwood109 said in ZFS is Perfectly Safe on Hardware RAID:
If it only does this in software RAID mode, is there any other filesystem that would accomplish using hardware RAID AND checksums?
No, the problem here is that a filesystem is fundamentally the wrong place for this to be handled, that's why you aren't finding the answer you are looking for, because you are attempting to define the answer in the question.
What you WANT to ask is "how do I safely store data" and for most people the answer is "hardware RAID and either XFS on Linux or NTFS on Windows." It's that simple. Exotic filesystems aren't relevant. Normal storage systems handle things like bit rot and have done so for a very long time. ZFS uses the "in the filesystem" trickery to make it sound special by simply redefining what they call the filesystem. In reality, ZFS doesn't answer "yes" to your question either, because ZFS doesn't do it in the filesystem, it does it in the RAID and disks, so does everything else. It's all semantic trickery to confuse.
Bit rot is handled in the hardware and ZFS will never see it. It's just overhead that you don't need.
https://alastairs-place.net/blog/2014/01/16/bit-rot-and-raid/
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@tjatwood109 said in ZFS is Perfectly Safe on Hardware RAID:
Thanks - I will proceed without using ZFS - I prefer hardware RAID.
Tim
ZFS is perfectly fine with hardware RAID, if you like ZFS' features otherwise (like zsend is nice) then there's no reason to avoid it. If you don't plan to use any unique features, then XFS is my "go to" choice by default. Very fast, very stable.
