# MinIO Erasure Code Quickstart Guide [![Slack](https://slack.min.io/slack?type=svg)](https://slack.min.io)

MinIO protects data against hardware failures and silent data corruption using erasure code and checksums. With the highest level of redundancy, you may lose up to half (N/2) of the total drives and still be able to recover the data.

## What is Erasure Code?

		if errs[index] != nil {
			parities[index] = -1
			continue
		}
		if !metadata.IsValid() {
			parities[index] = -1
			continue
		}
		// Delete marker or zero byte objects take highest parity.
		if metadata.Deleted || metadata.Size == 0 {
			parities[index] = len(partsMetadata) / 2
		} else {
			parities[index] = metadata.Erasure.ParityBlocks
		}
	}
	return
}

		}
		h.ServeHTTP(w, r)
	})
}

// criticalErrorHandler handles panics and fatal errors by
// `panic(logger.ErrCritical)` as done by `logger.CriticalIf`.
//
// It should be always the first / highest HTTP handler.
func setCriticalErrorHandler(h http.Handler) http.Handler {
	return http.HandlerFunc(func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
		defer func() {
			if rec := recover(); rec == logger.ErrCritical { // handle

	if err != nil {
		// The kernel can return valid but non integer values
		// but still, no need to interpret more
		return 0
	}
	if limit == cgroupMemNoLimit {
		// No limit set, It's the highest positive signed 64-bit
		// integer (2^63-1), rounded down to multiples of 4096 (2^12),
		// the most common page size on x86 systems - for cgroup_limits.
		return 0
	}
	return limit
}