Data corruption is the damage of info due to various software or hardware fails. After a file is corrupted, it will no longer function as it should, so an app will not start or shall give errors, a text file could be partially or fully unreadable, an archive file will be impossible to open and unpack, etc. Silent data corruption is the process of data getting damaged without any identification by the system or an admin, which makes it a serious problem for hosting servers as problems are very likely to happen on larger in size hard disks where vast volumes of information are located. If a drive is a part of a RAID and the info on it is copied on other drives for redundancy, it is more than likely that the damaged file will be treated as an undamaged one and will be duplicated on all of the drives, making the harm permanent. Lots of the file systems that run on web servers nowadays often are not able to find corrupted files in real time or they need time-consuming system checks during which the server is not operational.