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AMA - Ask Us Anything About ReadyNAS and You Could Win a ReadyNAS 214!
We are hosting an extended 4 week Ask Me Anything AMA for the NETGEAR ReadyNAS line of products and we would love to answer your ReadyNAS questions. Best of all, posting your question below enter...
I see you guys have bit rot protection enabled on this unit and some others. Could you give a bit of a technical explanation on how this works on your devices and how it differs or is superior to this sort of protection offered by other vendors? Are there any real downside to having it enabled?
WaywardTech wrote:
I see you guys have bit rot protection enabled on this unit and some others. Could you give a bit of a technical explanation on how this works on your devices and how it differs or is superior to this sort of protection offered by other vendors? Are there any real downside to having it enabled?
Bit-rot protection protects against bit-rot media degradation. There are some good generic articles on this e.g. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/bitrot-and-atomic-cows-inside-next-gen-filesystems/
Our implementation uses the BTRFS filesystem and the md software RAID. md software RAID is mature and a much safer choice than BTRFS RAID.
We link enabling/disabling bit-rot protection to enabling/disabling CoW (Copy on Write) although they are two separate things. CoW is useful for some kinds of data (e.g. videos that don't change a lot) but with other kinds (e.g. databases, virtual machines with a huge number of writes in place) you'll get a lot of fragmentation and a big performance hit.
Bit-rot protection is part of a data protection strategy, but the most important part is backups. Don't store important data on just the one device, no matter what that device is. If the primary copy of important (e.g. irreplaceable) data is on the NAS then you need to backup that data.
