Do You Have Bit Rot?

[agent_kith]

Bit rot is a form of data degradation. The files you created and copied to your storage medium (HDD/SSD/USB/etc) may not last forever. The previous music you painstakeingly ripped and tagged over the years will get corrupted over the passage of time.

Read the bit rot article for a primer, and test if your files are affected by this phenonomen.

Click to read Bit Rot, And How Important Is This For Audiophiles

Download the testflac module (refer to the Bit Rot article page 12 for usage instructions):

  testflac-1_0_1-generic.fw (Size: 656.29 KB / Downloads: 9)

[realysm42]

Bit rot is a form of data degradation. The files you created and copied to your storage medium (HDD/SSD/USB/etc) may not last forever. The previous music you painstakeingly ripped and tagged over the years will get corrupted over the passage of time.

Read the bit rot article for a primer, and test if your files are affected by this phenonomen.

Click to read Bit Rot, And How Important Is This For Audiophiles

Download the testflac module (refer to the Bit Rot article page 12 for usage instructions): 

Pretty sure I experienced this; two of my 8,500 tracks didn't work when I tried to analyse them in Jriver. They used to work because I liked the songs... not got round to fixing (re-ripping) them yet.

[agent_kith]

Pretty sure I experienced this; two of my 8,500 tracks didn't work when I tried to analyse them in Jriver. They used to work because I liked the songs... not got round to fixing (re-ripping) them yet.

Interesting you brought this thread up. For a while I'm investigating the feasibility of implementing ZFS into SnakeoilOS, while researching, I came across this:

Do I have to use ECC memory for ZFS?
Using ECC memory for OpenZFS is strongly recommended for enterprise environments where the strongest data integrity guarantees are required. Without ECC memory rare random bit flips caused by cosmic rays or by faulty memory can go undetected. If this were to occur OpenZFS (or any other filesystem) will write the damaged data to disk and be unable to automatically detect the corruption.

Unfortunately, ECC memory is not always supported by consumer grade hardware. And even when it is ECC memory will be more expensive. For home users the additional safety brought by ECC memory might not justify the cost. It's up to you to determine what level of protection your data requires.

So, it's really cosmic rays causing this? As rare as those events are, certainly well worth to check if any files are corrupted, and recover.

[agent_kith]

Here is an interesting video about computer bit flipping. And yes, cosmic rays.



I'm using a NAS with ZFS file system and ECC RAM for close to 5 years now (if not more), and I gotta say so far so good. To be fair the chances of a disk failure, even multi-disk failures are far, far, far higher than the chance of random bit flipping.

But hey we audiophiles are always striving for perfection. I want to ensure not only my music library, but also my family photos are preserved properly for years and years and years to come. A bit suss because this means my backup has to be ZFS and ECC protected too (i.e. I cannot just back up my contents to a USB HDD/SSD and be done with it).