How frequent are DRAM errors? How significant a factor is heat? Is it worth investing in ECC RAM?
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1possible duplicate of Should I use ECC RAM for the next computer I build?– Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007Dec 11, 2011 at 7:48
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@techie007: I don't see how those two are a duplicate. Advice and frequency differ...– Tamara WijsmanDec 11, 2011 at 8:09
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Only if your motherboard supports it. Mostly you want this for high useage servers and the boards will be designated for it.– Fiasco LabsNov 20, 2013 at 18:06
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Yes, it is worth investing in ECC, esp for critical applications, e.g. medical, space, financial. Nowadays, even GPUs have ECC. Occurrence of soft-errors has been increasing due to several reasons, e.g. process scaling, etc. See my survey paper for reference. Also see this related superuser question.– user984260Dec 20, 2015 at 16:32
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2 Answers
A paper addressing this issue was published here.
"The goal of this paper is to answer questions such as the following: How common are memory errors in practice? What are their statistical properties? How are they affected by external factors, such as temperature and utilization, and by chip-specific factors, such as chip density, memory technology and DIMM age?"
And this is a part from summaries:
"This either indicates that chip size does not play a dominant role in influencing CEs or >there are other, stronger confounders in our data that we did not control for." >Similarly, "In all cases, for the same utilization levels the error rates for high versus >low temperature are very similar."
I would still recommend ECC for production systems, mind you.
answered Aug 20, 2009 at 14:51
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Added some other points brought up by chris in my original answer and just made it all one.– TroggyAug 27, 2009 at 21:37
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You seem to have self-answered. But I don't see a frequency in your answer, are there any numbers? Dec 11, 2011 at 8:10
According to a study done by Google, memory errors are fairly common, affecting about 8% of DIMMS per year:
[Google study]
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf
[ZDNet interpretation/summary]
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/dram-error-rates-nightmare-on-dimm-street/638