Low level formatting exists on modern disks. You just are not able to reformat it. There is a diagram showing it here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2888 http:

Low level formatting exists on modern disks. You just are not able to reformat it. There is a diagram showing it here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2888 http://www.anandtech.com/show/2888 Doing a full read causes every sector's ECC in the low level formatting to be checked. If something is wrong, you get a read error that can be corrected by RAID, ZFS or whatever else you are running on top of it provides redundancy. Without the ECC, the self test mechanism would be pointless as it would have no way to tell if the magnetic signals being interpreted are right or wrong. As for other RAID levels catching things. With RAID 1 and only two mirrors, there is no way to tell which is right either. The same goes for RAID 10 with two mirrors and RAID 0+1 with two mirrors. You might be able to tell with RAID 6, but such things are assumed by users rather than guaranteed. RAID was designed around the idea that uncorrectable bit errors and drive failures are the only failure states. It is incapable of handling silent corruption in general and in the few cases where it might be able to handle it, whether it does is implementation dependent. RAID 6 also degrades to RAID 5 when a disk fails and there is no way for a patrol scrub to catch a problem that occurs after it and before the next patrol scrub. RAID will happily return incorrect data, especially since only 1 mirror member is read at a given time (for performance) and only the data blocks in RAID 5/6 are read (again for performance) unless there is a disk failure. There is no reason to use RAID with ZFS. However, ZFS will always detect silent corruption in what it reads even if it is on top of RAID. It just is not guarenteed to be able to correct it. Maybe you got the idea of "ZFS on top of RAID will NOT detect such errors 50% of the time" from thinking of a two-disk mirror. If you are using ZFS on RAID instead of letting ZFS have the disks and that happens, you really only have yourself to blame.