RedBear
Explorer
- Joined
- May 16, 2015
- Messages
- 53
After reading the article online talking about how (and why) RAID5 "died" in 2009, and seeing a reference in the newbie slideshow that even RAID-Z3 will stop being capable of guaranteeing data protection as soon as 2019, I am very curious as to what comes next. If I'm understanding things correctly this is happening because the individual drive data density is becoming so high that an unrecoverable read error (and/or second/third drive failure) is becoming ever more highly probable during the ever-longer rebuild processes.
Are we looking at a future where we have to stick to sub-10TB drives, or need ten fully redundant mirrors of each 25TB drive just to guarantee long-term data retention? Genuinely curious here, since the whole reason I'm getting into FreeNAS/ZFS in the first place is to be capable of building myself storage systems that will take care of my data for the coming decades. Surely there is a practical limit to new, higher RAID-Z levels. I've certainly heard no mention of RAID-Z4 or 5 even being in development. And yet, as the slideshow says, RAID-Z3 will soon "fail" at its task. Eventually we'll get stuck in a loop of having arrays fail and then having the backup array fail before we can even complete the restoration process.
Seems like the relatively near future of computing actually calls for something far more resilient and recoverable than ZFS, or data storage costs are going to start ballooning within a decade or so. Perhaps we need filesystems that happily allow a few unrecoverable bit errors here and there rather than freaking out and losing 100TB of data. (Although, I guess we already have plenty of filesystems that do that, amirite? *wink, wink, nudge, nudge*)
Or am I misunderstanding the whole mathematical inevitability of the future bit-storage situation?
Are we looking at a future where we have to stick to sub-10TB drives, or need ten fully redundant mirrors of each 25TB drive just to guarantee long-term data retention? Genuinely curious here, since the whole reason I'm getting into FreeNAS/ZFS in the first place is to be capable of building myself storage systems that will take care of my data for the coming decades. Surely there is a practical limit to new, higher RAID-Z levels. I've certainly heard no mention of RAID-Z4 or 5 even being in development. And yet, as the slideshow says, RAID-Z3 will soon "fail" at its task. Eventually we'll get stuck in a loop of having arrays fail and then having the backup array fail before we can even complete the restoration process.
Seems like the relatively near future of computing actually calls for something far more resilient and recoverable than ZFS, or data storage costs are going to start ballooning within a decade or so. Perhaps we need filesystems that happily allow a few unrecoverable bit errors here and there rather than freaking out and losing 100TB of data. (Although, I guess we already have plenty of filesystems that do that, amirite? *wink, wink, nudge, nudge*)
Or am I misunderstanding the whole mathematical inevitability of the future bit-storage situation?