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Comment by morecoffee | Hacker News Reader

Making data on individual drives is probably not a long term goal for integrity. It is more likely that multi homing data in geographically disjoint locations with some sort of syncing is a better long term goal. Fixing silent data corruption on a single drive doesn't solve any of the much more likely disasters, like fire, flooding, weather, etc. Not even datacenters can withstand lightning.

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The problem with multiple geographic locations, in this context, is that you'd have to read from all of them, and compare the results, to know that you have file corruption. Which is, needless to say, not something that it makes sense to do.

The purpose of data block checksumming isn't to make your data more resilient (at least directly), it's to make sure you know you have a problem. Once you know you have a problem, then you can go read from your alternate datacenter or whatever.

Agreed, and that's how zfs does it behind the scenes. When it detects a read error, it uses the pool redundancy (whether mirrors or RAIDZn, whichever you're using) to transparently recover from the error. Even if you set up a pool with only one disk you can still set it to keep multiple copies of all the data.

A super-ZFS that automatically did that using remote mirrors would be interesting, but would also stretch the definition of "transparent" a bit.

Not even datacenters can withstand lightning.

Data centers do have lighting protection. Lighting protection is very low-tech.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rod

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