Non-ECC Memory Corrupted My Hard Drive Image – Why ECC Memory Is So Important

Re:Non-ECC Memory Corrupted My Hard Drive Image – Why ECC Me... by encryptluks2 on Sunday December 25, 2022 @09:46AM (#34127640)

I watched the full video. It was long but very informative. The humor at times made up and the presenter showed a lot of deep knowledge that most people won't have. My biggest gripe is that they just didn't try replacing the RAM sticks in the first place. I get that they wanted to do a root cause analysis, but geez the time and patience they had to do all those memory tests. No wonder they did a video about it, cause otherwise that lost time would have been painful.

Onto the discussion of ECC RAM. In a perfect world, all memory would be ECC... but try finding some high performance 16GB sticks of ECC DDR4 RAM like what you'll see on gaming computers. I don't even think they make anything comparable in terms of speed and definitely not costs. I guess you don't really know that you needed ECC until it's too late.

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Re:Non-ECC Memory Corrupted My Hard Drive Image – Why ECC Me... by morelikeborelax on Sunday December 25, 2022 @09:53AM (#34127701)

> " I guess you don't really know that you needed ECC until it's too late."

I spent many years on hardware consultation and was amazed at the all the times I had to explain it was just a what if insurance like any other things their business was mitigating against. Sometimes they'd even decided they needed to save costs in non-ecc ram when it was $4 a gb in difference, or (during the FB-DIMM era) there wasn't even an option to avoid it.

Never really understood the resistance towards it.

Maybe the lack of evidence before the Google study and people thinking RAM manufacturers were trying to rip them off or something.

The "never had a problem so why would I need" it attitude with no way to know if an issue was caused by a bit flip was most baffling.

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Re:Non-ECC Memory Corrupted My Hard Drive Image – Why ECC Me... by simoncion on Sunday December 25, 2022 @12:07PM (#34128836)

> ...but try finding some high performance 16GB sticks of ECC DDR4 RAM like what you'll see on gaming computers.

Here ya go:

https://nemixram.com/16gb-ddr4-3200-pc4-25600-ecc-udimm-2rx8...

It doesn't have pretty lights on it, but it does seem to be in the same speed class that gets called "gaming RAM" by a _whole_ bunch of retailers.

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Re:Non-ECC Memory Corrupted My Hard Drive Image – Why ECC Me... by encryptluks2 on Sunday December 25, 2022 @11:50PM (#34134705)

For real. I am going to have to look into this more. While it isn't by a global retail manufacturer, the price is like a fraction of most other RAM so I am curious. Does NewEgg or Amazon sell it directly, and if not why not?

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Re:Non-ECC Memory Corrupted My Hard Drive Image – Why ECC Me... by simoncion on Monday December 26, 2022 @03:13PM (#34141331)

NEMIX sells through Newegg, but it's one of those "Newegg routes the sale through the seller" things, rather than "Newegg buys the thing from the seller and handles the shipping and everything" thing. In my experience, the price is the same whether you order through Newegg's website, or through NEMIX's website.

Unless you have a particular reason to keep your order history in Newegg, just buy direct from NEMIX.

(IDK about NEMIX's relationship with Amazon, as I don't buy things from Amazon.)

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Re:Non-ECC Memory Corrupted My Hard Drive Image – Why ECC Me... by pedrocr on Monday December 26, 2022 @08:10AM (#34137345)

There's no adequately priced ECC UDIMMs because the market is so small. Servers use registered so it's a very small niche. But for the gaming overclock application it would actually be a great fit. Because ECC gives you a great early indication of failure, verifying that an overclock is stable enough to use becomes much easier. My hope for ECC availability is that one of the gaming brands decides to upsell it as a feature and then we can build nice workstations with fast ECC RAM. I'll even put up with RGB for it if I must. AMD board manufacturers have been in a great position to do this since the beginning of Ryzen. Too bad none of them have.

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