On Sunday 08 April 2007 00:30, hajhouse wrote: ... > Do you think ECC is worth the premium?
I do. Not that I worry about cosmic rays so much, but it seems to be cheap insurance against some types of hardware failures silently corrupting your data, or having something crash or act strangely and you have no idea if it's a hardware or software failure. No guarantees of course but I'm pretty sure it's a meaningful layer of protection. IBM thought that memory error detection was important when they made the original PCs. These included a parity bit for each 8-bit byte of memory. I still remember the dreaded "PARITY ERROR" coming up in various situations having nothing to do with cosmic rays. Somewhere along the PC's evolution path the feature was mostly discarded, and I suppose that was because of the very tight profit margins in this business. After building the first server that I co-located, I had to take it out of the co-lo facility several times due to strange disk corruption problems. It's extremely frustrating to track down an intermittent failure, and very time-consuming. Finally I replaced a memory stick and the problems went away. If something like ECC were built in, it would have been diagnosed immediately. Rod _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
