I've never had ECC memory to my knowledge. What have I been missing out on, in practice? Can we confidently say that x% of my past BSOD were the direct consequence?
> I've never had ECC memory to my knowledge. What have I been missing out on, in practice? Can we confidently say that x% of my past BSOD were the direct consequence?
I very highly doubt so. I remember BSOD and Guru meditations (on the Amiga) before that. Once I switched to Linux suddenly no more BSOD and very little kernel panics. I've had at times my desktop reach six months of uptime.
I think bit-flips are a great excuse for unreliable software.
BTW I'm not saying ECC is unnecessary: I'm saying it's unlikely the lack of ECC was the reason for most of the BSOD you saw throughout the ages.
The bitflip would also have to cause an error in logic that would result in a system lockup. That's unlikely, given that most information flowing through ram is probably data, not logic.
You may have been lucky enough to never experienced a bad module. But when it does happen, it can have major consequences (losing data, having to reinstall an OS). All while being totally preventable.
Not enough people realise that the driving reason for ECC in home systems is this, not random once-in-a-blue-moon bit flips
I’ll always buy ECC after multiple data loss events from ram suddenly going bad, worth every penny to have ECC ring alarm bells rather than put 2+2 together after random BSODs and silent corruption
