Technically true, but practically hardware is very unlikely to fail in a way that maintains self-consistency. Eg, if you checksum all the data, what you can ex

Technically true, but practically hardware is very unlikely to fail in a way that maintains self-consistency. Eg, if you checksum all the data, what you can expect from bad RAM is either to detect a mismatch, or to mis-calculate the checksum and something else will detect a mismatch later. You certainly can't count on it, but enough of that sort of thing makes it a lot more likely you'll notice something is not quite right eventually.