Re:Please Use ZFS with ECC Memory (2014)
by adrian_b on Saturday August 06, 2022 @04:08PM
(#32371140)
ECC does not reduce errors only 10 times, but by several orders of magnitude.
The frequency of DRAM errors is proportional with the amount of memory installed in a computer. For smaller quantities of memory, e.g. 16 GB or 32 GB, the frequency might be of one error every few months. With ECC, the mean time between errors is likely to become longer than the lifetime of the computer.
Intel, who has initiated this absurdity of convincing the naive customers that it is OK to buy computers that may make mistakes from time to time, has succeeded to get away with it only due to the huge amount of software bugs, which have made the computer users believe that whenever a computer crashes, or some corrupted data is discovered, it is more likely that the cause has been a software bug and not a hardware defect.
The integrated circuits made with modern CMOS processes, with very small devices, have a non-negligible aging rate.
Because of that, memory modules that have been used for many years start at some point to have much more frequent errors than when new.
When you have ECC, such memory modules are immediately detected and they can be replaced before causing some irremediable data corruption. This helped me a lot a few times.
The frequency of DRAM errors is proportional with the amount of memory installed in a computer. For smaller quantities of memory, e.g. 16 GB or 32 GB, the frequency might be of one error every few months. With ECC, the mean time between errors is likely to become longer than the lifetime of the computer.
Intel, who has initiated this absurdity of convincing the naive customers that it is OK to buy computers that may make mistakes from time to time, has succeeded to get away with it only due to the huge amount of software bugs, which have made the computer users believe that whenever a computer crashes, or some corrupted data is discovered, it is more likely that the cause has been a software bug and not a hardware defect.
The integrated circuits made with modern CMOS processes, with very small devices, have a non-negligible aging rate.
Because of that, memory modules that have been used for many years start at some point to have much more frequent errors than when new.
When you have ECC, such memory modules are immediately detected and they can be replaced before causing some irremediable data corruption. This helped me a lot a few times.