Editing Data corruption (section)

== Overview ==
[[File:Atari 2600 with corrupted ram.jpg|thumb|Photo of an Atari 2600 with corrupted RAM.]]
[[File:Fourteen Second Clip of Corrupted Video.ogg|thumb|right|A video that has been corrupted. ''Epilepsy warning: This video contains bright, flashing images.'']]
There are two types of data corruption associated with computer systems: undetected and detected.  Undetected data corruption, also known as ''silent data corruption'', results in the most dangerous errors as there is no indication that the data is incorrect.  Detected
data corruption may be permanent with the loss of data, or may be temporary when some part of the system is able to detect and correct the error; there is no data corruption in the latter case.

Data corruption can occur at any level in a system, from the host to the storage medium.  Modern systems attempt to detect corruption at many layers and then recover or correct the corruption; this is almost always successful but very rarely the information arriving in the systems memory is corrupted and can cause unpredictable results.

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Data corruption during transmission has a variety of causes. Interruption of data transmission causes [[Data loss|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.
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Hardware and software failure are the two main causes for [[data loss]].  [[Background radiation]], [[head crash]]es, and [[Mean time between failures|aging]] or wear of the storage device fall into the former category, while software failure typically occurs due to [[Software bug|bugs]] in the code.
[[Cosmic ray]]s cause most [[soft error]]s in DRAM.<ref>{{cite web|author = Scientific American|date = 2008-07-21|title = Solar Storms: Fast Facts|url = http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=solar-storms-fast-facts|publisher = [[Nature Publishing Group]]|access-date = 2009-12-08|url-status = live|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20101226165751/http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=solar-storms-fast-facts|archive-date = 2010-12-26|author-link = Scientific American}}</ref>