Data degradation is the gradual corruption of computer data due to an accumulation of non-critical failures in a data storage device. It is also referred to as data decay, data rot, digital decay, or bit rot. or other high-energy particles. Such data degradation is known as a soft error.
Low-level disk controllers typically employ error correction codes (ECC) to correct erroneous data.
Higher-level software systems may be employed to mitigate the risk of such underlying failures by increasing redundancy and implementing integrity checking, error correction codes and self-repairing algorithms. as does ReFS.