As others have stated, if the current state has corruption, you roll it back. As I posted in response to another post above, this is as easy as "zpool clear -F

As others have stated, if the current state has corruption, you roll it back. As I posted in response to another post above, this is as easy as "zpool clear -F $POOLNAME". The fact that the vast majority of other filesystems have no way to detect silent corruption of data (only metadata inconsistencies) is far more frightening to me. Here is an nice article written by someone who discovered just how unreliable disks are, after switching to ZFS (because other filesystems couldn't detect the corruption). Quite an eye-opener. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/opensolaris/data-rot-jsp-135610.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/opensolaris/data-r... If you use chrome and are getting the same error as I am, here's the google cache link (Firefox will load it): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:caEwhGDIoGIJ:www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/opensolaris/data-rot-jsp-135610.html+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:caEwhGD... The article references sources of studies of hard disk corruption, if you'd want something with even more detail and statistics: http://research.cs.wisc.edu/wind/Publications/pointer-dsn08.pdf http://research.cs.wisc.edu/wind/Publications/pointer-dsn08.... http://static.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/bairavasundaram/bairavasundaram.pdf http://static.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/bair...