Overheads of Checksumming

Before closing, we now discuss some of the overheads of using checksums for data protection. There are two distinct kinds of overheads, as is common in computer systems: space and time.

Space overheads

Space overheads come in two forms:

Disk related overheads

The first is on the disk (or another storage medium) itself; each stored checksum takes up room on the disk, which can no longer be used for user data. A typical ratio might be an 8- byte checksum per 4 KB data block, for a 0.19% on-disk ...