Do You Have Bit Rot?

[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.