I always thought that the reason zfs did its extensive CRC checks was primarily to detect data corruption while it was in RAM or over the network, with a side effect that in the rare cares that data on disk got corrupted without the drive detecting it because the CRC was still valid, it'd also be spotted.
But anyway, it might be worth testing by replacing some of the disk images with actually truncated ones so that there are holes when reading, so that it returns an actual read error rather than junk data.
I have seen this a few times on HDDs that had been used for the cold storage of archival data, for several years (around 5 years or even more). For each archive file, I had my own hash values that were used to detect corrupted files, which allowed me to detect all such cases. I had duplicates for all such HDDs. Sometimes both HDD copies had a few silent corrupted sectors, but they were not in the same locations, so in all cases I could recover the corrupted files from their duplicates. If I had stored the archival data without redundancy, I would have lost it.
If you do not use hashes or other error-detecting codes for all your files, like I do, you may have had some failures in your HDDs without recognizing them, but such errors are much more likely to happen in files that have been stored for many years.
There's been times when some features of entire models of drives have been disabled in the Linux kernel because of buggy firmware that silently writes bad data (with correct ECC), so reading it back is successful from both the drive's and the OS's block driver views.
I was hit by this myself with the queued TRIM command firmware bug that affected all Samsung EVO 840 SSDs (Linux kernel commit 9a9324d3969678d44b330e1230ad2c8ae67acf81 if you want to look into the history) - the drive didn't report any errors, but ZFS kept reporting corruption, and kept on fixing it in the background.
Nope, it's always been about on-disk bit rot.
First off: drive firmware has been known to return the wrong LBA data. The OS asks for 123, the drive reads 234—and verifies its drive-level CRC, which passes—and sends it up. Application gets a bundle of bits that's not correct. With ZFS, it expects a certain checksum from that part of the tree/file, and so the LBA 234 gets returned it will not match the checksum that is for 123.
Next, if you have RAID-1, then if the drive has corrupted data, if you don't have higher-level FS checksums, how do you which mirror has the correct data? They're different, but which is correct. With ZFS you know which block has the correct checksum, return that data to application, and then use the correct data to correct the wrong one.
anonymous_user9•2d ago
God the intensity is tiresome. Whether or not it's AI slop, it's also bad writing. Things can be fun or interesting or worthwhile without being a harrowing battle of discovery!