On Wed, 04 Oct 2006 10:58:27 +0800 Feizhou feizhou@graffiti.net wrote:
Then there is their dependence on properly working hardware. Recently they have been talking about making reisefs more robust to hardware faults. So if your disk starts acting up, you might lose data or even your whole filesystem...
There was a nice paper published recently (at OLS or maybe I got the link from one of OLS presentations) about an "iron ext3", ext3 modified to withstand various data corruptions caused possibly by hardware failures. In there is also a nice table with comparisons on how different linux file systems stand up to those corruptions:
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/iron-sosp05.pdf
Very good reading to anyone who's concerned about digital data storage.
Also, for discussion about cheap storage there's a mailing list called "linux-ide-arrays": http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-ide-arrays&r=1&w=2 Subscribe at http://lists.math.uh.edu/cgi-bin/mj_wwwusr
But remember ... "Cheap, fast, reliable. Pick any two, you can't have all three" ... is even more true for storage than for anything else ;)