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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • That’s not what storage engineers mean when they say “bitrot”.

    “Bitrot”, in the scope of ZFS and BTFS means the situation where a hard-drive’s “0” gets randomly flipped to “1” (or vice versa) during storage. It is a well known problem and can happen within “months”. Especially as a 20-TB drive these days is a collection of 160 Trillion bits, there’s a high chance that at least some of those bits malfunction over a period of ~double-digit months.

    Each problem has a solution. In this case, Bitrot is “solved” by the above procedure because:

    1. Bitrot usually doesn’t happen within single-digit months. So ~6 month regular scrubs nearly guarantees that any bitrot problems you find will be limited in scope, just a few bits at the most.

    2. Filesystems like ZFS or BTFS, are designed to handle many many bits of bitrot safely.

    3. Scrubbing is a process where you read, and if necessary restore, any files where bitrot has been detected.

    Of course, if hard drives are of noticeably worse quality than expected (ex: if you do have a large number of failures in a shorter time frame), or if you’re not using the right filesystem, or if you go too long between your checks (ex: taking 25 months to scrub for bitrot instead of just 6 months), then you might lose data. But we can only plan for the “expected” kinds of bitrot. The kinds that happen within 25 months, or 50 months, or so.

    If you’ve gotten screwed by a hard drive (or SSD) that bitrots away in like 5 days or something awful (maybe someone dropped the hard drive and the head scratched a ton of the data away), then there’s nothing you can really do about that.


  • If you have a NAS, then just put iSCSI disks on the NAS, and network-share those iSCSI fake-disks to your mini-PCs.

    iSCSI is “pretend to be a hard-drive over the network”. iSCSI can exist “after” ZFS or BTRFS, meaning your scrubs / scans will fix any issues. So your mini-PC can have a small C: drive, but then be configured so that iSCSI is mostly over the D: iSCSI / Network drive.

    iSCSI is very low-level. Windows literally thinks its dealing with a (slow) hard drive over the network. As such, it works even in complex situations like Steam installations, albeit at slower network-speeds (it gotta talk to the NAS before the data comes in) rather than faster direct connection to hard drive (or SSD) speeds.


    Bitrot is a solved problem. It is solved by using bitrot-resilient filesystems with regular scans / scrubs. You build everything on top of solved problems, so that you never have to worry about the problem ever again.



  • Wait, what’s wrong with issuing “ZFS Scan” every 3 to 6 months or so? If it detects bitrot, it immediately fixes it. As long as the bitrot wasn’t too much, most of your data should be fixed. EDIT: I’m a dumb-dumb. The term was “ZFS scrub”, not scan.

    If you’re playing with multiple computers, “choosing” one to be a NAS and being extremely careful with its data that its storing makes sense. Regularly scanning all files and attempting repairs (which is just a few clicks with most NAS software) is incredibly easy, and probably could be automated.






  • I live in the suburbs, because I recognize that I get all the benefits of cities with almost none of the downsides. Don’t hate the player, hate the game. As long as I can afford the suburbia and as long as it leads to a better life, I’ll take advantage of it.

    But in the vast majority of cases, its the cities that provide the value (IE: job creation, center of commerce and innovation, location of efficiency with public transit / steamworks / useful infrastructure)… while suburbs are basically trying to live as close to the city as possible without taking on the responsibilities (IE: taxes go to the suburb schools / suburb cops without paying into the city that makes the suburb livable)

    Jury Duty is just one more thing that proves the pattern. People mostly don’t commit crimes in suburbia, because no one is doing commerce in suburbia (its more efficient to centralize commerce into the city). So when crimes are committed, they’re usually in the city (white-collar, suing, traffic crimes, etc. etc.). So the overworked city-justice system (already at a disadvantage due to higher crime due to being the center of commerce) is then overworked some more as they usually can’t recruit jurors.

    Doubly-so for cities like New York City who are supporting the suburbs in New Jersey. New York City cannot cross state lines and grab jurors from New Jersey, even though we all damn well know that New Jersey residents constitute a huge portion of the traffic, commerce, crime, and other problems in NYC.


    Less so for cities closer to the center of a state… especially if the State can better distribute jurors / taxes and have a more fair system.