Silent data corruption is real and that is why I use ZFS wherever possible

Sometimes errors go unnoticed and not detected by the hard disk firmware or the Linux/Unix operating system. Such errors are known as silent data corruption. To avoid such errors, one should use a file system that can detect those errors.

From the blog post:

Here’s something you never want to see:

ZFS has detected a checksum error:

   eid: 138
 class: checksum
  host: alexandria
  time: 2017-01-29 18:08:10-0600
 vtype: disk

This means there was a data error on the drive. But it’s worse than a typical data error — this is an error that was not detected by the hardware. Unlike most filesystems, ZFS and btrfs write a checksum with every block of data (both data and metadata) written to the drive, and the checksum is verified at read time. Most filesystems don’t do this, because theoretically the hardware should detect all errors. But in practice, it doesn’t always, which can lead to silent data corruption. That’s why I use ZFS wherever I possibly can.

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