I'm surprised how little is done to protect data in modern systems. The two big things we should be doing - ECC ram and checksumming filesystems - are still nowhere close to being mainstream.

I recently bought and returned three(!) 3TB drives because I found they were silently corrupting data every 500GB of writes, or so (verified by testing on multiple systems) - I switched to 2TB from another brand, and had zero issues. I only knew there was a problem because I wrote a burn-in script to copy & verify over and over. File system, OS does not care. It's the drive's job.

Almost every USB stick I've ever used eventually had some small corruption issue - again, no way to catch this unless you are looking for this kind of thing.

Average consumer does not think this is even possible - the idea of your data silently getting scrambled seems impossible, like a car randomly being unable to break - it is just assumed this sort of thing does not happen. But as hard drives get bigger and people put more RAM in their systems I think this will become a huge issue. Of course, consumers will blame "a virus" or something along those lines.