Speed turned out to be an important factor in choosing a hash or a checksum algorithm, so I did some benchmarks on a 1GB in memory dataset to see what the throughput will be. The CPU used was a 2.83GHz quad core xeon. These are the results (in megabytes / second):

SHA256: 115.89

SHA512: 179.65

SHA1: 310.59

MD5: 467.58

CRC32: 903.8

Adler32: 1316.2

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