Comment by markhahn
4 days ago
no, the firmware does any maintenance. good firmware should do gradual scrub whenever it's idle. unfortunately, there's no real way to know whether the firmware is good, or doing anything.
I wonder if there's some easy way to measure power consumed by a device - to detect whether it's doing housekeeping.
Honestly this is one of my favorite things about ZFS. I know that a disk scan is performed every week/month (whatever schedule). And I also know that it has verified the contents of each block. It is very reassuring in that way.
You've validated that the scrub is actually running, right? I know that the lack of a default schedule for ZFS scrubs caused Linus Media Group to lose a bunch of archived videos to bitrot.
I have zed email me every time a scrub completes. I get weekly emails because I do weekly scrubs. If I don’t see an email I know something is up!
In threads like this I keep hearing about ZFS. What would be the drawbacks of running ZFS as a home user? I keep my OS on the SSD and my files on spinning rust, if that's relevant.
1) you have to have an OS that supports it.
2) even if your OS supports it, you may have difficulty using it for your root volume, so partitioning is probably required.
2a) in your case you may not want to use it on your boot volume which would negate the SSD benefit for you.
3) it is recommended that you have ECC RAM due to the checksums. This isn’t a hard and fast requirement, but it does make you more resilient to bitflips.
4) it isn’t the absolute fastest file system. But it’s not super slow. There are caching options for read and write that benefit from SSDs, but you’re just adding costs here to get speed increases.
I only use it on servers or NASs. The extra hassles of using it on a workstation keep me from running it on a laptop. Unless you want to use FreeBSD that is… then you’d be fine (and FreeBSD is pretty usable as a daily driver). Realistically, I’m not sure how practical it is for most home users. But it is an example of what a filesystem can offer when it is well designed.
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