On 2010-Apr-05 12:20:12 +0200, Jeremie Le Hen <jere...@le-hen.org> wrote: >Nonetheless I'm a little worried by what you said about the lack of ECC. >Computers has been used for years before ECC came out and obviously they >worked :).
Not really. Most early computers had fairly extensive error detecting hardware. Early microprocessors didn't because the novelty of getting an entire on a CPU on a chip was enough. Most 486 based PCs supported parity RAM but maufacturers and end-users found they could save pennies by leaving the parity bits off. ECC support was a requirement for building servers with microprocessors and some support has trickled down to the desktop. It hasn't been really popular because wider memory costs more and most people want the fastest, cheapest system possible to make their games render faster. Occasional glitches don't matter. With the current generation of CPUs, Intel appear to have made a marketing decision to not support ECC on their desktop CPUs - if you want ECC, you need to user a server-grade CPU (with a much greater profit margin). AMD have gone the other way and have have ECC support in all their x64 chips except mobile ones. You are still at the mercy of motherboard manufacturers who decide to not include the tracks between the DIMM sockets and the CPU. > Do you really think it might happen to be a problem? There's no way to know. Definitely, the added error checking in ZFS have resulted in a number of "ZFS kept reporting errors and I found I actually had bad hardware even though I've been using it for years" reports. > Would an Intel board would compensate for this? No. The memory controller is embedded in the Atom and doesn't support ECC. If you decide to go the ECC path, you need to pick a different CPU. -- Peter Jeremy
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