I'm surprised how little is done to protect data in modern systems. The two big things we should be doing - ECC ram and checksumming filesystems - are still nowhere close to being mainstream.
I recently bought and returned three(!) 3TB drives because I found they were silently corrupting data every 500GB of writes, or so (verified by testing on multiple systems) - I switched to 2TB from another brand, and had zero issues. I only knew there was a problem because I wrote a burn-in script to copy & verify over and over. File system, OS does not care. It's the drive's job.
Almost every USB stick I've ever used eventually had some small corruption issue - again, no way to catch this unless you are looking for this kind of thing.
Average consumer does not think this is even possible - the idea of your data silently getting scrambled seems impossible, like a car randomly being unable to break - it is just assumed this sort of thing does not happen. But as hard drives get bigger and people put more RAM in their systems I think this will become a huge issue. Of course, consumers will blame "a virus" or something along those lines.
It doesn't help that Intel has artificially limited ECC support to specific processors. As the amount of memory in PC increases and the frequency at which components operate, the probability of memory errors increases, yet Intel still foolishly refuses to support ECC in their consumer line selling it as a "server" feature and limiting it to Xeons.
"Who the f*ck are they to send me reliability
patches, when they can't even get the basics right?"
I remember reading Microsoft made a push to get hardware vendors to use ECC Ram with Vista - they recognized a lot of crashes were due to this (but XP would get the blame). No go.
AMD does for their Athlon FX processors, but support is mostly dependent on the motherboard. With that said, most of the AMD motherboards for AM3+ support it, and it's limited to unbuffered ECC.
Unfortunately, that means choosing ECC over power and performance vs. Intel. It's really a sad state of affairs.
I recently bought and returned three(!) 3TB drives because I found they were silently corrupting data every 500GB of writes, or so (verified by testing on multiple systems) - I switched to 2TB from another brand, and had zero issues. I only knew there was a problem because I wrote a burn-in script to copy & verify over and over. File system, OS does not care. It's the drive's job.
Almost every USB stick I've ever used eventually had some small corruption issue - again, no way to catch this unless you are looking for this kind of thing.
Average consumer does not think this is even possible - the idea of your data silently getting scrambled seems impossible, like a car randomly being unable to break - it is just assumed this sort of thing does not happen. But as hard drives get bigger and people put more RAM in their systems I think this will become a huge issue. Of course, consumers will blame "a virus" or something along those lines.