Reed–Solomon error correction
In a cluster of hundreds or thousands of machines, the odds are low that all will be running and reachable at any given moment, so fault tolerance is the central design challenge. QFS meets it with Reed–Solomon error correction. The form of Reed–Solomon encoding used in QFS stores redundant data in nine places and can reconstruct the file from any six of these stripes. When it writes a file, it by default stripes it across nine physically different machines — six holding the data, three holding parity information. Any three of those can become unavailable. If any six remain readable, QFS can reconstruct the original data. The result is fault tolerance at a cost of a 50% expansion of data.