alt Hacker News> This disk was probably dying. I did some research, and a RAID wouldn’t have saved it either, RAID protects against drive failure, not against silent page corruption that gets faithfully replicated to every mirror.
I dispute this was a 'silent' drive error as many systems reported read errors. Silent data corruption on hard drives is extremely rare, due to the tons of checksums used on all data. Maybe I'm wrong but I bet there are read errors on the drive in the appropriate system logs.
I feel that people confuse regular 'bad blocks' with 'silent data corruption' and there is a huge difference[0].
[0]: https://louwrentius.com/what-home-nas-builders-should-unders...
Agreed on the error not being silent. Also incorrect about RAID being unable to catch silent errors - it depends on the implementation - in Linux there's lvmraid that has the option to enforce integrity. There is also zfs which on top of everything else, has RAID functionality and integrity enforcement.