Data Integrity Field (DIF) is an approach to protect

data integrity Data integrity is the maintenance of, and the assurance of, data accuracy and consistency over its entire Information Lifecycle Management, life-cycle. It is a critical aspect to the design, implementation, and usage of any system that stores, proc ...

computer data storage Computer data storage or digital data storage is a technology consisting of computer components and Data storage, recording media that are used to retain digital data. It is a core function and fundamental component of computers. The cent ...

from

data corruption Data corruption refers to errors in computer data that occur during writing, reading, storage, transmission, or processing, which introduce unintended changes to the original data. Computer, transmission, and storage systems use a number of meas ...

. It was proposed in 2003 by the T10 subcommittee of the

International Committee for Information Technology Standards The InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), (pronounced "insights"), is an ANSI-accredited standards development organization composed of Information technology developers. It was formerly known as the X3 and NCIT ...

. A similar approach for data integrity was added in 2016 to the NVMe 1.2.1 specification. Packet-based storage transport protocols have CRC protection on command and data payloads. Interconnect buses have parity protection. Memory systems have parity detection/correction schemes. I/O protocol controllers at the transport/interconnect boundaries have internal data path protection. Data availability in storage systems is frequently measured simply in terms of the reliability of the hardware components and the effects of redundant hardware. But the reliability of the software, its ability to detect errors, and its ability to correctly report or apply corrective actions to a failure have a significant bearing on the overall storage system availability. The data exchange usually takes place between the host CPU and storage disk. There may be a storage data controller in between these two. The controller could be

RAID RAID (; redundant array of inexpensive disks or redundant array of independent disks) is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical Computer data storage, data storage components into one or more logical units for th ...

controller or simple storage switches. DIF included extending the

disk sector In computer disk storage, a sector is a subdivision of a track on a magnetic disk or optical disc. For most disks, each sector stores a fixed amount of user-accessible data, traditionally 512 bytes for hard disk drives (HDDs), and 2048 byt ...

from its traditional 512 bytes, to 520 bytes, by adding eight additional protection bytes. This extended sector is defined for Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) devices, which is in turn used in many enterprise storage technologies, such as

Fibre Channel Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed data transfer protocol providing in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data. Fibre Channel is primarily used to connect computer data storage to Server (computing), servers in storage area networks (SAN) in ...

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...

included support for DIF in the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...

. An evolution of this technology called T10 Protection Information was introduced in 2011.Safeguarding Data From Corruption - Technology Paper
PDF, Seagate, 2011

References

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External links

Linux Data Integrity
August 30, 2008,

, by Martin K. Petersen (archived from the original on January 9, 2015)
Linux Storage Topology and Advanced Features
November 24, 2009, by Martin K. Petersen
Data Integrity Field - T10.org
working on Feb 15 2019. Error detection and correction