Comment by strbean
1 day ago
> IBM estimated in 1996 that one error per month per 256 MiB of RAM was expected for a desktop computer.
From the wikipedia article on "Soft error", if anyone wants to extrapolate.
1 day ago
> IBM estimated in 1996 that one error per month per 256 MiB of RAM was expected for a desktop computer.
From the wikipedia article on "Soft error", if anyone wants to extrapolate.
That makes it vanishingly unlikely. On a 16GB RAM computer with that rate, you can expect 64 random bit flips per month.
So roughly you could expect this happen roughly once every two hundred million years.
Assuming there are about 2 billion Windows computers in use, that’s about 10 computers a year that experience this bit flip.
> 10 computers a year experience this bit flip
That's wildly more than I would have naively expected to experience a specific bit-flip. Wow!
Scale makes the uncommon common. Remember kids, if she's one in a million that means there are 11 of her in Ohio alone.
~800 bit flips per year per computer. 2 billion computers with 800 bit flips each is 1,600,000,000,000 (one point six trillion) bit flips.
Big numbers are crazy.
I saw a computer with 'system33', 'system34' folders personally. Also you would never actually know it happened because... it's not ECC. And with ECC memory we replace a RAM stick every two-three months explicitly because ECC error count is too high.
Got any old microwaves with doors that don't quite shut all the way nearby? Or radiation sources?
Rounding that to 1 error per 30 days per 256M, for 16G of RAM that would translate to 1 error roughly every half a day. I do not believe that at all, having done memory testing runs for much longer on much larger amounts of RAM. I've seen the error counters on servers with ECC RAM, which remain at 0 for many months; and when they start increasing, it's because something is failing and needs replaced. In my experience RAM failures are much rarer than for HDDs and SSDs.