End-to-end data integrity for file systems: a ZFS case study

Abstract

We present a study of the effects of disk and memory corruption on file system data integrity. Our analysis focuses on Sun's ZFS, a modern commercial offering with numerous reliability mechanisms. Through careful and thorough fault injection, we show that ZFS is robust to a wide range of disk faults. We further demonstrate that ZFS is less resilient to memory corruption, which can lead to corrupt data being returned to applications or system crashes. Our analysis reveals the importance of considering both memory and disk in the construction of truly robust file and storage systems.