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> Bits can't rot in HDD or SSD outside of firmware bugs or transmission errors The entire photography community begs to differ. Gradual degradation of stored
by huhtenberg 7y ago
> Bits can't rot in HDD or SSD outside of firmware bugs or transmission errors
The entire photography community begs to differ.
Gradual degradation of stored image data across HDDs of all vendors is very well documented, mainly because the bit rot is very easy to spot when working with visual data.
Bit flips are persistent and they occur on the media itself, not in transmission. There are plenty of theories, including one that argues that bits are flipped by stray neutrinos, but nobody knows for sure.
- neverartful 7y agoArs Technica did a really good article [1] on bit rot. Although it's angled towards filesystems, it also provides good discussion on bit rot in general. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/bitrot-and-atomic-cows-inside-next-gen-filesystems/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/bitro... (edited to make more readable)
- masklinn 7y ago> The entire photography community begs to differ. Also ZFS. Part of its purpose and design goals was countering bit rot (as well as device hostility to keeping data safe), as Sun had customers affected (even with ECC). Hence the end-to-end checksumming amongst other features. scrub exists pretty much just for bit rot: you run scrub regularly, it goes over the disk, checks that every block checksums properly, and if they don't[0] it repairs the data using the non-corrupted copy (assuming you have one). [0] and your dataset is replicated, note that even if you don't use a raid configuration you can mark important dataset as to-duplicate for this purpose (this is not equivalent to device redundancy, it's a feature which exists solely for bitrot / corruption protection)