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To word your statement differently: without ECC, your memory either works fine or is corrupted. But you don't know which one it is, until you run memtest. How o
by photon-torpedo 10y ago
To word your statement differently: without ECC, your memory either works fine or is corrupted. But you don't know which one it is, until you run memtest. How often do you do that?
Personal anecdote: Upgraded RAM in my PC, ran memtest, everything fine. A year later, I need to move and so I consolidate all my data on a big hard disk. As the disk is new, I run some verification and notice some non-matching checksums. Long story short, the new RAM had become defective, and a new memtest showed a handful of errors after a few hours. Had I had ECC on that machine, I probably would have seen notifications about memory errors even before that day (plus the errors would likely have been corrected).
If Ryzen allows us to build a powerful PC with ECC for little more money than a non-ECC one, I'll happily pay for this "feel good feature". The current ECC-capable alternative from the Intel universe (Xeon CPU & motherboard) is simply too expensive for most people.
- lewisl9029 10y ago> To word your statement differently: without ECC, your memory either works fine or is corrupted. But you don't know which one it is, until you run memtest. How often do you do that? Definitely this. The extra safety of mind offered by ECC RAM is totally worth the tiny price difference for me. The only thing that stopped me from actually using it was the lack of (affordable) CPU support. Ryzen changes that. On that note, I hope it's not long until we can easily buy ultraportable laptops with ECC RAM without paying through the nose for Intel's ridiculous prices for their mobile Xeon CPUs.
- sundvor 10y agoI can't wait to see more than 4 cores in a laptop!
- type0 10y agoWhat many don't realize is that ECC is a bit like paying for insurance just built in to hardware, most likely you won't need it, but if you can run ECC sticks other than cost there is no reason not to.