has a variety of causes. Interruption of data transmission causes information loss. Environmental conditions can interfere with data transmission, especially when dealing with wireless transmission methods. Heavy clouds can block satellite transmissions. Wireless networks are susceptible to interference from devices such as microwave ovens. Hardware and software failure are the two main causes for data loss. Background radiation, head crashes, and aging or wear of the storage device fall into the former category, while software failure typically occurs due to bugs in the code. Cosmic rays cause most soft errors in DRAM. Silent Some errors go unnoticed, without being detected by the disk firmware or the host operating system; these errors are known as silent data corruption. There are many error sources beyond the disk storage subsystem itself. For instance, cables might be slightly loose, the power supply might be unreliable, external vibrations such as a loud sound, the network might introduce undetected corruption, cosmic radiation and many other causes of soft memory errors, etc. In 39,000 storage systems that were analyzed, firmware bugs accounted for 5–10% of storage failures. All in all, the error rates as observed by a CERN study on silent corruption are far higher than one in every 1016 bits. Webshop Amazon.com has acknowledged similar high data corruption rates in their systems. In 2021, faulty processor cores were identified as an additional cause in publications by Google and Facebook; cores were found to be faulty at a rate of several in thousands of cores. One problem is that hard disk drive capacities have increased substantially, but their error rates remain unchanged. The data corruption rate has always been roughly constant in time, meaning that modern disks are not much safer than old disks. In old disks the probability of data corruption was very small because they stored tiny amounts of data. In modern disks the probability is much larger because they store much more data, whilst not being safer. That way, silent data corruption has not been a serious concern while storage devices remained relatively small and slow. In modern times and with the advent of larger drives and very fast RAID setups, users are capable of transferring 1016 bits in a reasonably short time, thus easily reaching the data corruption thresholds. As an example, ZFS creator Jeff Bonwick stated that the fast database at Greenplum, which is a database software company specializing in large-scale data