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Date:      Fri, 18 Dec 2009 10:42:41 -0500
From:      Thomas Burgess <wonslung@gmail.com>
To:        "James R. Van Artsdalen" <james-freebsd-fs2@jrv.org>
Cc:        freebsd-fs <freebsd-fs@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: ZFS RaidZ2 with 24 drives?
Message-ID:  <deb820500912180742h77fdd635i48973b877d98281d@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <4B2B9F82.4020909@jrv.org>
References:  <568624531.20091215163420@pyro.de> <42952D86-6B4D-49A3-8E4F-7A1A53A954C2@spry.com> <957649379.20091216005253@pyro.de> <26F8D203-A923-47D3-9935-BE4BC6DA09B7@corp.spry.com> <deb820500912161320n43c552d7rf84264332574a701@mail.gmail.com> <E9C46E04-1A81-4EE5-909E-557EA08D16A9@corp.spry.com> <4B299CEA.3070705@jrv.org> <deb820500912161908o7736a667qe24eec9e33f53a8@mail.gmail.com> <4B2B9F82.4020909@jrv.org>

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On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 10:28 AM, James R. Van Artsdalen <
james-freebsd-fs2@jrv.org> wrote:

> Thomas Burgess wrote:
> > One thing most people don't know about hard drives in general is that
> > sometimes up to 30% of the space is actually ECC.  With software raid
> > systems like ZFS, this will eventually be somethign that we can take
> > advantage of.
>
> i was basing this information on a talk Jeff Bonwick gave.  Google
JeffBonwick_*zfs*-What_*Next*-SDC09.pdfand it should show the information
i'm talking about.


> ECC is less than 10% of the space.  The inter-sector gap and gap between
> a sector's address and data fields, etc, are larger and more problematic
> as rotation speeds increase.
>
> > Because of this,  you can imagine a scenario where  allowing ZFS to
> > use this ECC space as raw storage, while leaving the data corrections
> > to ZFS would be ideal.  It's not only a matter of space, it will also
> > lead to nice improvements in speed.  (more data can be read/written by
> > the head as it passes)
>
> The disk drive industry's solution to this is 4K sector sizes.  See
> http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3691
>
> Even ZFS would need major changes to use drives without ECC without an
> increased hard error rate.  I don't see this happening since no
> filesystems exist yet for this environment, and since transitions to new
> filesystems are so slow (99.9%+ of systems today are running filesystems
> architectures at least two decades old).
>

again, i got my information from the lead zfs developer. I also spent a lot
of time on google reading up on this after hearing about it because i found
it to be so interesting.  I am a layman though, so perhaps i'm wrong.



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