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Bit rot is very much an issue on NAND. Reading causes disturbances. Flash chips have to compensate for drift in the voltage levels of cells that occurs as things age. While there are layers of protection using error correcting codes, in my experience corruption is more common with SSDs than HDDs. I've retired at least 3 SSDs from various generations over the past 14 years because of data corruption, and 1 SSD that simply refused to show up anymore. In comparison, the HDDs I've had have almost all failed without returning corrupt data, mostly due to mechanical failure.

Sadly, Apple doesn't believe in using ECC memory on their devices. The photos might get corrupted in RAM on the phone, or on an Apple laptop or who knows where. Without end to end checksums, there's no way to know when and where the photos are getting corrupted. Modern filesystems with built in checksumming are definitely worth the overhead.




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