Not merely exaggerated, nonsense. All filesystems using non ecc memory are more likely to experience damage to the data stored therein.

Zfs is no more likely to be damaged that anything else.

This whole confusion stems from zfs devs suggestion that ecc ram be used and people who don't know any better thinking oh that must be some special requirement for zfs.

These folks then spread this misinformation all over the Internet where its passed on by people who know nothing about the topic.

Pro tip: don't talk about things on the Internet that you only know about 3rd or 37th hand. If you know nothing about the topic you aren't improving the store of human knowledge by passing on noise.

> Not merely exaggerated, nonsense. All filesystems using non ecc memory are more likely to experience damage to the data stored therein.

If it were "nonsense" then one could flip the argument and say "ECC memory has no beneficial effect what-so-ever" - which be both know is untrue. However I can see why people do say "nonsense" given the ECC-myth seems to only be discussed in relation to ZFS and the probability data errors due to non-ECC memory is small.

For what it's worth, I did originally include a comment about how the risk being the same as on any other file systems - but then deleted it fearing I might have overlooked something on another fs I'm less familiar with.

> Pro tip: don't talk about things on the Internet that you only know about 3rd or 37th hand. If you know nothing about the topic you aren't improving the store of human knowledge by passing on noise.

I don't think that's fair. The problem with 1st hand experience is that it's often just based on anecdote. Which can often be worse than 3rd hand advice. And in the case of failures: often some products are too widely used to be worth constantly badgering the development team for help; which means you end up having to rely on the advice of others. The problem is really more that some people are terrible at researching so take 3rd hand advice without bothering to fact checking it.

In any case, I don't know if your comment was aimed at me or not, but I do have nearly 10 years of experience (wow that's gone quick!) running ZFS across a variety of systems, some running ECC memory, others not. I've also been a keen study of the Sun/Oracle docs. So I do consider myself reasonably well informed from both credible sources and personal experience. Though I'm not arrogant enough to assume I'm an expert either - communities like HN can be deeply humbling places.

> > Not merely exaggerated, nonsense. All filesystems using non ecc memory are more likely to experience damage to the data stored therein.

> If it were "nonsense" then one could flip the argument and say "ECC memory has no beneficial effect what-so-ever" - which be both know is untrue.

The original argument is like an implication ("no ECC => don't use ZFS"), which he refutes by saying (correctly), that file systems are generally affected the same way by memory corruption. Your argument seems to invert the original implication and drawing conclusions from that (fallacy of the converse, I believe). ∎

He was refuting my "greatly exaggerated" remark by going on to make the same points I was alluding to albeit directly and in more detail. So I was in turn elaborating on my choice of language.

I feel between this post and you're previous one that you are basically just agreeing with me via the process of nitpicking the language I used.

s/exaggerated/wrong