Hacker News Reader

I'm really looking forward to the Reed-Solomon article. It seems that very few RAID-like applications are built to handle arbitrary data and parity stripes.

View on HN

Yev from Backblaze -> we are SO jazzed to write that one up soon. We're trying to find a good way to present it, otherwise it would have been included here, but that would have made for a very long read. Stay tuned!

Here's a nice explanation of how ZFS does triple parity raid with reed-solomon:

http://people.freebsd.org/~gibbs/zfs_doxygenation/html/da/dc...

http://people.freebsd.org/~gibbs/zfs_doxygenation/html/d1/d7...

Note that the Plank paper claimed to support arbitrary N+M, but was then amended six years later identifying a critical flaw that invalidates its claims. Nevertheless, the technique can be adapted to work for up to triple parity.

So better than most, but still not arbitrary. And the limiting factor seems to be write performance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com