Quote about current situation: Typical consumer grade hard drives have a target of one unreadable bit for every 10^14 read from disk (10^14 bits is about 12 TB

Quote about current situation: Typical consumer grade hard drives have a target of one unreadable bit for every 10^14 read from disk (10^14 bits is about 12 TB, so if you have six 2 TB disks in an array, that array probably has an error on it); That's an error unrecoverable by the hardware, passed to the system software - if it hits an encrypted or compressed archive, with no ECC itself, the whole bundle of data is corrupted. Photos, music, movies, etc. probably fare better. The article does not specify if the 10^14 number is going up in the new hardware. If not ...