An Analysis of Data Corruption in the Storage Stack

An important threat to reliable storage of data is silent data corruption. In order to develop suitable protection mechanisms against data corruption, it is essential to understand its characteristics. This paper presents the first large-scale study of data corruption. It analyzes corruption instances recorded in production storage systems containing a total of 1.53 million disk drives, over a period of 41 months. The paper studies three classes of corruption: checksum mismatches, identity discrepancies, and parity inconsistencies.