I am, among other things, a sysadmin who babysits several RAIDs, including a 10TB one. I can confirm that the large capacity SATA disks have a noticeably high

I am, among other things, a sysadmin who babysits several RAIDs, including a 10TB one. I can confirm that the large capacity SATA disks have a noticeably high error rate, which I have never seen before. It used to be that RAID protected you from disk failures, but we aren't seeing that nearly as much now as we are unrecoverable bit errors on otherwise healthy disks. I have set all our RAID controllers to scrub the data and compare the mirrors every weekend. In the past couple of years we've only had a couple of unrecoverable read errors, but many recoverable read errors. Recoverable read errors are still bad, the disk gets taken offline and out of the RAID set for up to a minute while the controller retries many times until the data can be read. Then the sector is remapped to another part of the disk. So yes, it is a real problem, but it isn't too hard to manage in this era of filesystem snapshotting plus high speed RAID6 controllers. In return we've been given huge amounts of storage space.