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Date:      Fri, 18 Dec 2009 09:28:02 -0600
From:      "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:  <4B2B9F82.4020909@jrv.org>
In-Reply-To: <deb820500912161908o7736a667qe24eec9e33f53a8@mail.gmail.com>
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>

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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. 

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).



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