[hackshack]

This is incredibly frightening. I’ve seen data rot up close, and as a former data janitor, I can sympathize. My advice is to control everything down to the wall socket. I considered the Synology boxes for my home NAS, but my “spider sense” was tingling, so I built around an HP MicroServer Gen8 with an LSI PCIe card, and mirrored drives. It’s on a double-conversion UPS (Smart-UPS RT). It runs FreeNAS on VMware ESXi, and the drives present as raw volumes to ZFS. No data integrity issues after ~3 years. Note the trend: clean power, good server-y hardware, matched drives in a simple RAID, properly resourced ZFS, etc. But yeah, spinning disks are generally not a “backup.”

[Maakuth]

Even in this setup there's a caveat: HP sells Microservers with non-ECC hardware too. I think after human error, in your setup the likeliest threat to data integrity is faulty memory modules propagating corruption to disks (in essence you'll have a dirty buffer in faulty RAM). ZFS helps you catch this, but it's not magic so be sure to have the ECC version.