Every time you read or write from a RAID volume, it does perform validation and write-back on error detection. I think your mental model of how linux software RAID works needs updating.
I'm not trying to argue that mdadm is better than ZFS, just that in this case they pretty much compare the same.
Re:71 TiB DIY NAS Based on ZFS on Linux
by justincormack on Tuesday September 02, 2014 @05:41PM
(#8260338)
If the _drive_ reports a read error it will. If there is silent data corruption it wont. You can test this by using dd to corrupt the underlying data on a drive.
First, in between your monthly/weekly scrubs your disks/controllers will be silently corrupting data, possibly generating errors on multiple devices resulting in data loss depending on raid type. ZFS detects corruption much more quickly.
Second, your traditional raid recovery is to rewriting the entire device to fix a single block. Let's say you're using RAID5 and you're rewriting parity. You get another block error. Oops, now you've lost everything. Since disks have an uncorrectible block error rate of 1 in 10^15 bits, you only need a moderately sized array to almost guarantee data loss. ZFS rewrites corrupt data on the fly.