[Dibby053]

>storage [...] bit flipping

As someone with no storage expertise I'm curious, does anyone know the likelyhood of an error resulting in a bit flip rather than an unreadable sector? Memory bit flips during I/O are another thing but I'd expect a modern HDD/SSD to return an error if it isn't sure about what it's reading.

[halfcat]

Not sure if this is what you mean, but most HDD vendors publish reliability data like “Non-recoverable read errors per bits read”:

https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...

[Dibby053]

Thanks for the link. I think that 10^14 figure is the likelyhood of the disk error correction failing to produce a valid result from the underlying media, returning a read error and adding the block to pending bad sectors. A typical read error that is caught by the OS and prompts the user to replace drives.

What I understand by bit flip is a corruption that gets past that check (ie the "flips balance themselves" and produce a valid ECC) and returns bad data to the OS without producing any errors. Only a few filesystems that make their own checksums (like ZFS) would catch this failure mode.

It's one reason I still use ZFS despite the downsides, so I wonder if I'm being too cautious about something that essentially can't happen.