This is correct, I checked claim against the paper and the paper does seem to be talking about errors that were caught by the SSD itself: http://0b4af6cdc2f0c59

This is correct, I checked claim against the paper and the paper does seem to be talking about errors that were caught by the SSD itself: http://0b4af6cdc2f0c5998459-c0245c5c937c5dedcca3f1764ecc9b2f.r43.cf2.rackcdn.com/23105-fast16-papers-schroeder.pdf http://0b4af6cdc2f0c5998459-c0245c5c937c5dedcca3f1764ecc9b2f... It could have been that the paper was about errors detected by checksums at the level of Google's distributed storage engine, but that's not the case. This means that Apple could in fact be using entirely standard SSDs while being correct in their claim that they don't need checksums. Their SSDs may sometimes bubble "uncorrectable errors" up to them, but like the article says, redundancy doesn't help you avoid those on SSDs.