So, while others have pointed out the media blocks are ECC protected/etc, I think what you are really looking for is application/fs control. LTO supports "Logic

So, while others have pointed out the media blocks are ECC protected/etc, I think what you are really looking for is application/fs control. LTO supports "Logical Block Protection" which is meta data (CRC's) which are tracked/checked alongside the transport level ECC/etc on fibrechannel & the drive itself. Check out section 4.9 in https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/system/files/inline-files/LTO%20SCSI%20Reference%20(EXTERNAL-18Aug2021)_1.pdf https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/system/files/inline-files/.... To be clear, this is a "user" level function that basically says "here is a CRC I want the drive to check and store alongside the data i'm giving it". It needs to be supported by the backup application stack/etc if one isn't writing the drive with scsi passthrough or similar. Its sorta similar to adding a few bytes to a 4k HD sector (something some FC/scsi HDs can do too) turning it into a 4K+X bytes sector on the media, that gets checked by the drive along the way vs, just running in variable block mode and adding a few bytes to the beginning/end of the block being written (something thats possible too since tape drives can support blocks of basically any size). The problem with these methods, is that one should really be encoding a "block id" which describes which/where the block is as well. Since its entirely possible to get a file with the right ECC/protection information and its the wrong (version) file. So, while people talk about "bitrot", no modern piece of HW (except intel desktop/laptops without ECC ram) is actually going to return a piece of data that is partially wrong because there are multiple layers of ECC protecting the data. If the media bit rots and the ECC cannot correct it, then you get read errors.