Comment by loeg

9 years ago

> There is roughly 3% chance of error in RAM per DIMM per year. That doesn't justify buying ECC if you have just one personal computer to worry about.

How do you make that leap?

It's an inappropriate leap. Consumers should have ECC memory too.

However the consumer market has long decided to settle for ECC nowhere and cheap everywhere.

ECC hardware comes at premium option that can easily be +100%. You need support in the memory, the motherboard and the CPU.

Given the price difference, personal computers will have to live with the memory errors. People will not pay double for their computers. Manufacturers will not sacrifice their margin while they can segment the market and make a ton of money off ECC.

  • Bristol Ridge does support ECC BTW, but one problem is that you can't use ECC with x16 chips (because ECC is 72-bit), so with 8GB of RAM and 8Gbit chips you have to choose between non-ECC/ECC single channel with x8 chips and non-ECC dual channel with x16 chips. 4Gbit don't have this problem but will become obsolete especially when 18nm ramps up, and while DRAM prices should decline when that happens...

    • What's the matter with x8/x16 chips and dual channel? I don't think it should matter.

      Or do you mean that if you want exactly 8GB then it's hard to find a pair of 4GB DDR4 ECC modules? Well, just get 2x8GB if you are a performance nut.

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I'd like to know this, too.

I am guessing it's because, if RAM errors increase linearly with the number of computers, then RAM errors will be a greater and greater proportion of total errors. This assumes other kinds of errors don't scale linearly. Someone looking through logs is looking for errors, they'd like to find fixable logic errors, not inevitable RAM errors.

A cost/benefit analysis for a system where non critical operations are performed would seem to favor the non ECC memory. I suspect this is the case for the majority of people who have computers for their personal use, without taking into account that they might not even be aware such a thing exists. Although, I haven't compared ECC prices lately.

  • Your game machine can live without ECC.

    Your NAS should better have it, though.