Here's the thing. If you want storage, you've got to use ZFS or be very brave and use BTRFS. RAID and single drive solutions are not going to cut it. Bit rot is a real thing and assuming you care about your data you want checksums and redundancy. If you don't want to think about it: set up a FreeNAS/NAS4Free appliance. If you do, build something slightly custom. To date, I know of no complaints maimed products that fit this criteria. It is frustrating, but family photos are not replaceable so don't take chances.
While this is likely true at the consumer level, it is not true at the enterprise level. Raid6 is used extensively, and the file hash is stored in metadata, separately. The files are walked periodically to detect and repair corruption. The same is done for parity. This has to be done with zfs too, via zfs scrub. I just don't think you can directly compare zfs with raid, as zfs is a filesystem and therefore implements some of the same things that other companies end up building on top of raid with their own custom filesystems.
I did not realize there were RAID implementations that did block level checksums.
ZFS is both a file system and a block layer. You would use RAID + ext4 or ZFS. The block layer parts of ZFS are comparable to RAID and are superior in many ways, including the most important: checksums.
Comments
Here's the thing. If you want storage, you've got to use ZFS or be very brave and use BTRFS. RAID and single drive solutions are not going to cut it. Bit rot is a real thing and assuming you care about your data you want checksums and redundancy. If you don't want to think about it: set up a FreeNAS/NAS4Free appliance. If you do, build something slightly custom. To date, I know of no complaints maimed products that fit this criteria. It is frustrating, but family photos are not replaceable so don't take chances.
While this is likely true at the consumer level, it is not true at the enterprise level. Raid6 is used extensively, and the file hash is stored in metadata, separately. The files are walked periodically to detect and repair corruption. The same is done for parity. This has to be done with zfs too, via zfs scrub. I just don't think you can directly compare zfs with raid, as zfs is a filesystem and therefore implements some of the same things that other companies end up building on top of raid with their own custom filesystems.
I did not realize there were RAID implementations that did block level checksums.
ZFS is both a file system and a block layer. You would use RAID + ext4 or ZFS. The block layer parts of ZFS are comparable to RAID and are superior in many ways, including the most important: checksums.