4 ms·

The tangible benefits, in 2017, for the "average workstation user" (if such a thing even exists) are vanishingly slim. The sole benefit is correcting random bi

by hug 10y ago

The tangible benefits, in 2017, for the "average workstation user" (if such a thing even exists) are vanishingly slim. The sole benefit is correcting random bitflips in memory. These bitflips don't occur often enough per byte of RAM in workstation environments to matter: It's far more likely you'll have an issue with corruption due to poorly developed software than due to EMI. However if you're building a home NAS on commodity hardware, and you're concerned about things like data integrity, ECC is definitely preferred.

geezerjay 10y ago
Let's say the workstation packs 64GB of RAM, and it's used for number-crunching tasks which include jobs that take as much RAM as they can get. How often do you believe these random bitflips could happen in a year of continuous use?
- xorblurb 10y ago
  It depends, with perfect components maybe as rare as one bitflip a year, or maybe even less. However you can have all the spectrum with slightly defective components. There are some rates that are really unfortunate because you don't even detect them with a few hours of memtest, yet when you use your WS for lets say a few weeks every so often you have a random extra non-deterministic fun crash, like an ICE that disappear when you relaunch your build. Unless you have some funny notion of how you want to spend your time, you don't want to risk to fall in that situation...
xorblurb 10y ago
That's bullshit. You have no reason to care about data integrity in your NAS but not in your workstation. Plus "random" bitflips can have various causes, and except if you spend a weekend to a month memtesting your non-ECC ram you have no way to not know if you don't have a slightly defective chip. Also, if you wish to risk to trash your most important design files after a good afternoon of work, or miscompile a binary for extra fun, or maybe even an FPGA bitstream, well that's your problem and to each one their way to have fun, however on my side I rather not piment my life with that kind of crap. The last thing you want if you are doing any kind of creative work is more or less random bitflips that happen very rarely but still more that lets say once in a year (YMMV). If your bitflips are too frequent you will soon notice and "fix" the problem (if you don't switch to ECC you actually fix nothing, but if you have a defective chip and switch to a good one at least you mitigate your issue) For information the defect rate in consumer electronic is in the order of 1% (not specifically for RAM, I don't have any exact figure, but as a general order of magnitude figure it should be something like 1%). I know there are too much software bug here and there, but I don't want to add extra ultra-non-deterministic data destructing bugs just for fun.

by hug 10y ago

geezerjay 10y ago

Let's say the workstation packs 64GB of RAM, and it's used for number-crunching tasks which include jobs that take as much RAM as they can get. How often do you believe these random bitflips could happen in a year of continuous use?

xorblurb 10y ago
It depends, with perfect components maybe as rare as one bitflip a year, or maybe even less. However you can have all the spectrum with slightly defective components. There are some rates that are really unfortunate because you don't even detect them with a few hours of memtest, yet when you use your WS for lets say a few weeks every so often you have a random extra non-deterministic fun crash, like an ICE that disappear when you relaunch your build. Unless you have some funny notion of how you want to spend your time, you don't want to risk to fall in that situation...

xorblurb 10y ago

That's bullshit. You have no reason to care about data integrity in your NAS but not in your workstation. Plus "random" bitflips can have various causes, and except if you spend a weekend to a month memtesting your non-ECC ram you have no way to not know if you don't have a slightly defective chip. Also, if you wish to risk to trash your most important design files after a good afternoon of work, or miscompile a binary for extra fun, or maybe even an FPGA bitstream, well that's your problem and to each one their way to have fun, however on my side I rather not piment my life with that kind of crap. The last thing you want if you are doing any kind of creative work is more or less random bitflips that happen very rarely but still more that lets say once in a year (YMMV). If your bitflips are too frequent you will soon notice and "fix" the problem (if you don't switch to ECC you actually fix nothing, but if you have a defective chip and switch to a good one at least you mitigate your issue) For information the defect rate in consumer electronic is in the order of 1% (not specifically for RAM, I don't have any exact figure, but as a general order of magnitude figure it should be something like 1%). I know there are too much software bug here and there, but I don't want to add extra ultra-non-deterministic data destructing bugs just for fun.