Here's a link to a CERN paper that describes research that they have done of the stability of their (disc) storage systems. They reckon that their system has silent bit errors in the 10^-7 range. This seems small, but a terabyte of disc may have 3 corrupted files at this rate. What is worse is that you won't know that the files are corrupt - all the error detection has been defeated by the scale of the storage.
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@Bazza - don't trust your discs
Here's a link to a CERN paper that describes research that they have done of the stability of their (disc) storage systems. They reckon that their system has silent bit errors in the 10^-7 range. This seems small, but a terabyte of disc may have 3 corrupted files at this rate. What is worse is that you won't know that the files are corrupt - all the error detection has been defeated by the scale of the storage.
http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?contribId=3&sessionId=0&resId=1&materialId=paper&confId=13797
Less scientific review of the paper:
http://storagemojo.com/2007/09/19/cerns-data-corruption-research/