[Dovecot] Better to use a single large storage server or multiple smaller for mdbox?

[Jim Lawson]

On 04/13/2012 08:33 AM, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
>> What I meant wasn't the drive throwing uncorrectable read errors but
>> the drives are returning different data that each think is correct or
>> both may have sent the correct data but one of the set got corrupted
>> on the fly. After reading the articles posted, maybe the correct term
>> would be the controller receiving silently corrupted data, say due to
>> bad cable on one.
> This simply can't happen.  What articles are you referring to?  If the
> author is stating what you say above, he simply doesn't know what he's
> talking about.


?!  Stan, are you really saying that silent data corruption "simply
can't happen"?  People who have been studying this have been talking
about it for years now.  It can happen in the same way that Emmanuel
describes.

USENIX FAST08:

http://static.usenix.org/event/fast08/tech/bairavasundaram.html

CERN:

http://storagemojo.com/2007/09/19/cerns-data-corruption-research/

http://fuji.web.cern.ch/fuji/talk/2007/kelemen-2007-C5-Silent_Corruptions.pdf

LANL:

http://institute.lanl.gov/resilience/conferences/2009/HPCResilience09_Michalak.pdf

There are others if you search for it.  This problem has been well-known
in large (petabyte+) data storage systems for some time.

Jim