Hello,
I've been reading these forums for the past few months, considering whether or not to make the move to ZFS. However, my system currently has standard, non-ECC RAM, and pursuant to this hardforum thread (http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1689724), I'm wondering whether ZFS' aggressive RAM-based ARC cache will expose my data to RAM-based corruption more so than HFS+. Is it true that files caches in RAM are not checked for integrity? On the flip side, I'm not sure how much HFS+ likes to cache files in memory (I imagine Don might have some insight on this?), so I'm not sure if a 'tradeoff' is the proper way to conceptualize it.
For those who do not have ECC memory, is it possible to minimize corruption risk by disabling the primary ARC cache, perhaps relying on an SSD for L2ARC instead? My understanding is that L2ARC is subject to the same integrity checks as the main ZFS pool.
I realize that end-to-end data integrity is not possible on non-ECC systems (even if all caching were disabled, something could happen to an open file while in memory), but I'm wondering if disabling the primary ARC cache is a reasonable step for non-ECC systems.