rico Offline Upload & Sell: Off
|
Quality of DRAM—both the chips and the packaging—has improved greatly in the last decade or two. The original IBM PC was designed to detect single-bit errors via a simple parity check, and halt instantly. Later, ECC circuitry arrived to detect and correct single-bit errors, allowing an orderly shutdown for repairs. Nowadays, consumer PCs have no detection at all in order to lower cost, but a non-zero risk remains. From Wikipedia:
"Large scale studies on non-ECC main memory in PCs and laptops suggest that undetected memory errors account for a substantial number of system failures: the study reported a 1-in-1700 chance per 1.5% of memory tested (extrapolating to an approximately 26% chance for total memory) that a computer would have a memory error every eight months."
My PCs are always configured for ECC, and Intel now requires the premium Xeon CPU and chipsets for the privilege. For peace of mind, and especially for 24/7 servers with a lot of memory, I consider this feature to be essential. The Memtest utility is great, but the OS must be shut down, and memory errors can be both episodic and sensitive to the system workload.
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_parity
|