One of the three most dreaded words in the computer world is “SILENT DATA CORRUPTION“. Your data gets corrupted just enough that it isn’t readily detectable by most applications and operating systems and you think your data’s good until you actually need to use it.

This weekend as I was doing some routine maintenance tasks on my home computer and moving some data over my Gigabit LAN (now cheap and common), I got bit badly by silent data corruption.

My Realtek network adapter which is one of the most ubiquitous on-board Gigabit Adapters in the world was the culprit and it had been causing me some massive grief for months and I just didn’t know it. Almost every modern Desktop Motherboard I know uses this particular on-board Gigabit adapter and I have to wonder how many millions of people are being affected by this issue and I have to wonder if this problem exists in any of the Server-based adapters from Realtek. More specifically, Realtek driver version 6.191 was the culprit.

Realtek, Network Adapter, NIC, Gigabit, Software, Drivers, WHQL, Windows Vista, Silent Data Corruption

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