Re: [zfs-discuss] question about self healing

2007-01-15 Thread Richard Elling

Kyle McDonald wrote:

Richard Elling wrote:

roland wrote:

i have come across an interesting article at :
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2859&p=5


Can anyone comment on the claims or conclusions of the article itself?

It seems to me that they are not always clear about what they are 
talking about.


Many times they say only 'SATA' and other times 'enterprise SATA' or 
'desktop SATA'
Likwise, somtimes they use the term SAS/SCSI, other times just 
'enterprise' without specifying SAS/SCSI or SATA.


I'm not clear on why the interconnect technology would have any affect 
on the reliability of the mechanics or electronics of the drive?


The interconnect doesn't have any affect on the mechanics.  I think it
is just a market segmentation description.  A rather poor one, too.

I do beleive that the manufacturer's could be targeting different 
customers with the different types of drives, but it's not clear from 
that article how Enterprise SATA drives compare to Enterprise SAS/SCSI 
drives. All I can get from the article for sure is don't use SATA 
desktop drives in a server.


Is 1 bit out of 10^14 really equal to 1 bit in 12.5TB read?


10^14 bits / 8 bits/byte = 12.5 TBytes.

Does that really translate to an 8% chance of a read error while trying 
to reconstruct a 1TB disk in a 5 disk RAID5 array?


Yes.

Something tells me that someones statistics calculations are off... I 
thought these problems were much rarer?


I believe these are rarer, for newer drives at least.  Over an expected
5 year lifetime, this error rate may be closer to reality.
 -- richard
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Re: [zfs-discuss] question about self healing

2007-01-15 Thread Kyle McDonald

Richard Elling wrote:

roland wrote:

i have come across an interesting article at :
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2859&p=5


Can anyone comment on the claims or conclusions of the article itself?

It seems to me that they are not always clear about what they are 
talking about.


Many times they say only 'SATA' and other times 'enterprise SATA' or 
'desktop SATA'
Likwise, somtimes they use the term SAS/SCSI, other times just 
'enterprise' without specifying SAS/SCSI or SATA.


I'm not clear on why the interconnect technology would have any affect 
on the reliability of the mechanics or electronics of the drive?


I do beleive that the manufacturer's could be targeting different 
customers with the different types of drives, but it's not clear from 
that article how Enterprise SATA drives compare to Enterprise SAS/SCSI 
drives. All I can get from the article for sure is don't use SATA 
desktop drives in a server.


Is 1 bit out of 10^14 really equal to 1 bit in 12.5TB read?

Does that really translate to an 8% chance of a read error while trying 
to reconstruct a 1TB disk in a 5 disk RAID5 array?


Something tells me that someones statistics calculations are off... I 
thought these problems were much rarer?


 -Kyle


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Re: [zfs-discuss] question about self healing

2007-01-13 Thread Richard Elling

roland wrote:
i have come across an interesting article at : 


http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2859&p=5

it`s about sata vs. sas/scsi realiability , telling that typical desktop sata drives 
".on average experience an Unrecoverable Error every 12.5 terabytes written or read (EUR of 1 in 1014 bits)."


since the 1TB drive is out very soon, this really makes me afraid of data 
integrity on my backup disks, so the question is:


The Hitachi 7K1000 announced recently has a spec of 1 UER in 10^15 bits.
This is the typical spec for an enterprise class drive, while consumer class
drives tend to be speced at 1 UER in 10^14 bits.

Our (Sun) field data shows better results than that, but you might want to
stay conservative in your design.


will zfs help detect/prevent such single-bit errors ?

i`m somewhat sure, that it will help if i use raid1 setup with ZFS - it`s self 
healing will detect those single-bit-errors and correct this - but what about 
single disk setup ?

can zfs protect my data from such single-bit-errors with a single drive ?


Yes, but you will need to mirror across slices.  This isn't as bad as it sounds
because the majority of failures are not whole drive failures.  Given a choice,
it is better to have two drives.  IIRC, the price range for the Hitachis will be
in the $400, so for less than $1000 you can get a mirrored TByte.  To put this
in perspective, in 1998 that would have cost $1M.  Next year, it might be as
low as $300 (my observation is that the price of disks asymptotically approaches
around $150 before they are EOLed and replaced with higher density models.)
 -- richard
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Re: [zfs-discuss] question about self healing

2007-01-13 Thread Toby Thain


On 13-Jan-07, at 11:52 AM, roland wrote:


i have come across an interesting article at :

http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2859&p=5

it`s about sata vs. sas/scsi realiability , telling that typical  
desktop sata drives
".on average experience an Unrecoverable Error every 12.5  
terabytes written or read (EUR of 1 in 1014 bits)."


since the 1TB drive is out very soon, this really makes me afraid  
of data integrity on my backup disks, so the question is:


will zfs help detect/prevent such single-bit errors ?

i`m somewhat sure, that it will help if i use raid1 setup with ZFS  
- it`s self healing will detect those single-bit-errors and correct  
this - but what about single disk setup ?


can zfs protect my data from such single-bit-errors with a single  
drive ?


I suppose you could have redundancy between slices. But this is  
fairly pointless since it won't protect against the certainty of  
eventual whole-drive problems.

--T



regards
roland


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Re: [zfs-discuss] question about self healing

2007-01-13 Thread James Dickens

On 1/13/07, roland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

i have come across an interesting article at :

http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2859&p=5

it`s about sata vs. sas/scsi realiability , telling that typical desktop sata 
drives
".on average experience an Unrecoverable Error every 12.5 terabytes written or 
read (EUR of 1 in 1014 bits)."

since the 1TB drive is out very soon, this really makes me afraid of data 
integrity on my backup disks, so the question is:

will zfs help detect/prevent such single-bit errors ?


zfs will detect a single bit error, if you are using raid either
raidz or mirroring it will fix the error.


i`m somewhat sure, that it will help if i use raid1 setup with ZFS - it`s self 
healing will detect those single-bit-errors and correct this - but what about 
single disk setup ?


if you aren't using mirroring or raidz the error will be detected but
won't be repaired. with the possible exception of metablocks that hold
information about the files and disk structures there are multiple
copy of these, and they can be used should the error occur in one of
those blocks.



can zfs protect my data from such single-bit-errors with a single drive ?


nope.. but it can tell you that it has occurred.


James Dickens
uadmin.blogspot.com


regards
roland


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[zfs-discuss] question about self healing

2007-01-13 Thread roland
i have come across an interesting article at : 

http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2859&p=5

it`s about sata vs. sas/scsi realiability , telling that typical desktop sata 
drives 
".on average experience an Unrecoverable Error every 12.5 terabytes written 
or read (EUR of 1 in 1014 bits)."

since the 1TB drive is out very soon, this really makes me afraid of data 
integrity on my backup disks, so the question is:

will zfs help detect/prevent such single-bit errors ?

i`m somewhat sure, that it will help if i use raid1 setup with ZFS - it`s self 
healing will detect those single-bit-errors and correct this - but what about 
single disk setup ?

can zfs protect my data from such single-bit-errors with a single drive ?

regards
roland
 
 
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