4 ms·
Do you not understand the problem here? The problem isn't detecting data corruption in storage, which parity checking also helps with. The problem is detecting
by empthought 10y ago
Do you not understand the problem here? The problem isn't detecting data corruption in storage, which parity checking also helps with. The problem is detecting data corruption in memory. ECC only matters after irrecoverable data loss _in memory_ has occurred. Without ECC the system will continue to operate; with ECC the system will halt without writing data at all, or correct it before storage even comes into play.
Writing corrupt data once or writing it a thousand times redundantly with parity data looks exactly the same, if it's allowed to happen. It's a valid write of invalid data. Either way, the data you have on your cheap laptop drive or your six-figure storage array is corrupt. This is why the ancestor commenter is correct about the storage technology being irrelevant to the choice to use or not use ECC.
I haven't been in school for many years. They taught Hamming codes, but they also taught garbage-in, garbage-out.