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Date:      Wed, 25 Jul 2007 19:57:36 +0100
From:      Doug Rabson <dfr@rabson.org>
To:        Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com>
Cc:        freebsd-fs@freebsd.org, Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd@freebsd.org>, Mark Powell <M.S.Powell@salford.ac.uk>
Subject:   Re: ZfS & GEOM with many odd drive sizes
Message-ID:  <1185389856.3698.11.camel@herring.rabson.org>
In-Reply-To: <20070725174715.9F47E5B3B@mail.bitblocks.com>
References:  <20070725174715.9F47E5B3B@mail.bitblocks.com>

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On Wed, 2007-07-25 at 10:47 -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
> >                 If you do that, ZFS can use its checksums to continually
> > monitor the two sides of your mirrors for consistency and will be able
> > to notice as early as possible when one of the drives goes flakey.
> 
> Does it really do this?  As I understood it, only one of the
> disks in a mirror will be read for a given block.  If the
> checksum fails, the same block from the other disk is read
> and checksummed.  If all the disks in a mirror are read for
> every block, ZFS read performance would get somewhat worse
> instead of linear scaling up with more disks in a mirror.  In
> order to monitor data on both disks one would need to
> periodically run "zpool scrub", no?  But that is not
> *continuous* monitoring of the two sides.

This is of course correct. I should have said "continuously checks the
data which you are actually looking at on a regular basis". The
consistency check is via the block checksum (not comparing the date from
the two sides of the mirror).





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