Pete Bentley wrote:
> Mario Goebbels wrote:
>> Heh, the last ever RAM problems I had was a broken 1MB memory stick on
>> that wannabe 486 from Cyrix like over a decade ago. And I never test my
>> machines for broken sticks :)
>
> If you don't test your RAM, how are you sure you have no problems (unless you
> exclusively use ECC memory)?
Even if you use ECC :-) though the probability that ECC will show an error is
much better than simple parity or nothing.
WARNING: PC vendors are very cost sensitive. In most cases, they will not offer
ECC. Try going to Fry's and asking for ECC memory, they will laugh at you (that
is, if they even know what ECC is)
> For example, a friend recently built a new zfs home fileserver which appeared
> to work fine but a zpool scrub of a large raidz pool after copying lots of
> files into it would consistently return one or two errors. That turned out
> to be marginal RAM, showed up by a long memtest86 run. Swapped the RAM and
> the problem went away.
>
> So RAM problems may not manifest themselves very obviously without some kind
> of checksumming technology (either a zfs pool or ECC on the memory itself). I
> have often wondered how much of Windows' poor reputation for stability is
> actually due to uncorrected RAM errors on cheapo PCs.
A Microsoft paper says that memory-induced failures are now in the top-10 list
of common failures. Microsoft is trying to create change, but since ECC DIMMs
will always cost more than non-ECC DIMMs, the market has not shown any interest.
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199601761
-- richard
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