Originally Posted By: mlord
Oh, and I notice that someone at OLS this year will be discussing making RAID rebuilds more intelligent by using the filesystem metadata to only sync actual allocated data areas, rather than blindly syncing all sectors.

This I'm curious to read more about to see how it is implemented. Almost sounds like ZFS levels of redundancy, without possibly having to commit to that filesystem. The tighter coupling would help eliminate your main gripe point with RAID smile

Another interesting way to handle this would be to signal the RAID system with TRIM (or UNMAP on SCSI systems). The RAID system could keep running at the block level with no filesystem knowledge, but still gain the benefits of knowing exactly what would need to be rebuilt in a failure.