CERN Research Paper Urges "Checksums Everywhere"

Error levels in modern magnetic storage are very, very low. Unfortunately, personal hard drives are now very, very big--and that means you're virtually guaranteed to have multiple corrupted files on your disk, just by virtue of its sheer size. That according to a recent study out of CERN/IT, the IT group at the world's largest particle physics laboratory. According to the executive summary, "We have established that low level data corruptions exist and that they have several origins. The error rates are at the 10Exp-7 level, but with complicated patterns. To cope with the problem one has to implement a variety of measures on the IT part and also on the experiment side. Checksum mechanisms have to implemented and deployed everywhere."