it seems to me that cryptographic integrity checks and backups would suffice, but … maybe not? To me the three scariest words in engineering are "common mode f

it seems to me that cryptographic integrity checks and backups would suffice, but … maybe not? To me the three scariest words in engineering are "common mode failure". I personally never buy more than one hard disk at a time, so that I'll hopefully avoid something like both haven been shaken too much in their shipping container (the best explanation anyone was able to come up with for a Seagate failure pattern some time ago). So, yes, the above, to detect and recover, but plenty of services need very up to date backups, so if I was designing such a system, I'd make sure the (near-)real time backup would be to SSDs that share nothing in common with my production ones, different manufacturer, chip sets, etc. Or if the load could handle it ... ah, I see why Seagate is still selling real SAS enterprise disks (last time I checked, if I remember correctly, <= 1TB and up to 15K RPM). We understand those, not that they won't also fail on you.