There absolutely is a practical use for checksums and error detection, even if you cannot do error correction. Error detection allows you to: * Discover and r

There absolutely is a practical use for checksums and error detection, even if you cannot do error correction. Error detection allows you to: * Discover and replace bad hardware (like the author of the article), * Avoid unknowingly using invalid data for calculations or program code, * Stop using the system and corrupting more data over time, * Restore files from backup while still in the retention period of your backup service. I once had a computer with a bad disk that somehow corrupted 1 bit out of about 150MB written, and probably only in some regions. I only found out after the GZip checksum of a very large downloaded file mismatched, and it took a while to figure out the real cause. By that time I had been using it for months, so it's unclear to this day what other files might have been corrupted.