To address the storage needs of applications that work with noisy data (e.g. image, sound, video data), where errors can be tolerated to a certain extent and performance is more critical than data fidelity, dynamic reliability levels enable storage devices capable of storing and retrieving data with varying degrees of data fidelity to dynamically change the degree of data fidelity in response to an application's request specifying reliability level. By allowing the application to specify the reliability level at which its data is stored and retrieved, dynamic reliability levels can increase read/write performance without sacrificing application accuracy. The application can specify reliability levels for different types or units of data, such as different reliability levels for metadata as opposed to data and so forth.