One hard drive - ZFS data integrity?

[JasonZ]

I'm considering using NAS4Free with only one drive configured as one VDev, ZFS.

Background: ZFS data integrity is the most important feature of ZFS to me. This is just for personal use. The data will not change often, but I'm concerned about silent bit rot over time. If the drive fails, it is okay if it takes a couple days to recover from backup. For backup, I would use a nightly CRON job to RSync to copy sync all files to another drive.

Question: In this scenario, what would happen if NAS4Free detected a data integrity problem during a scrub? Would it fail the VDev (the entire drive), or would it only mark the file as failed? If it fails the entire drive, would the only option be to replace the drive, create a new vdev (essential start from scratch), and then copy back the data from the secondary drive?

I'm trying to figure out if it is feasible to use only one drive. As mentioned, this is not mission-critical data that requires RAIDZ2.

[armandh]

if you just wish an always on, accessible data disk that has the data backed-up elsewhere, then
ZFS is unnecessary. a single UFS formatted drive is likely to be faster and will not need a lot of memory.

[JasonZ]

Background: ZFS data integrity is the most important feature of ZFS to me. The data will not change often, but I'm concerned about silent bit rot over time.

Does a single UFS formatted drive address bit rot over time?

[raulfg3]

Does a single UFS formatted drive address bit rot over time?

NO

[JasonZ]

So if you have a single ZFS drive, what happens when a scrub detects a data integrity failure?

[raulfg3]

happend that you know what file do you lose because you can't recover it ( but you can have other copy (backup) in other machine to restore).

In general is better idea to have a RaidZ1 to have the ability to recover damage file using parity info.