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A comment on HFS+ Bit Rot. Parent comment

Re:HFS+ Bit Rot by mzs on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @01:10PM (#7879116)
I've seen similar and noticed drives used for TM tend to fail more than other HFS+ formatted drives. One of my hunches is that SMART is not to be trusted and the repeated spin-up, do stuff, spin down of TM on those drives is the cause. The other is that rarely you will in fact get a garbled data packet over USB where the CRC happens to match.
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Re:HFS+ Bit Rot by kevinchen on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @08:23PM (#7881203)
But when I test the drives with badblocks, nothing shows up. The hardware is fine -- I write bytes and it gives them back to me when I read.

I suspect it's because Time Machine works by creating tons and tons of symlinks, which the HFS+ driver does not like. Regardless, it shouldn't be possible for a userspace application to corrupt the hard drive by creating a lot of links and folders.

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