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I won't bother on a desktop. I've been using 4 machines for the last 17 years with storage varying from 10GB to 2TB and RAM varying from 128MB to 16GB and haven

I won't bother on a desktop. I've been using 4 machines for the last 17 years with storage varying from 10GB to 2TB and RAM varying from 128MB to 16GB and haven't personally seen any kind of data corruption in motion (or at rest for that matter). Only had 2 mechanical drives fail (though predictably). ECC is costly. The memory modules itself and the board required to support it properly.

planteen 9y ago
Have you not had a computer do something unexpected in the last 17 years? A bit flip might look like a kernel or application crash. Have you ever saved a file that couldn't later be opened by an application? You probably blamed the application for being buggy, but it could have been an upset. Bit flips / upsets cause all sorts of odd behavior.
falcolas 9y ago
> haven't personally seen any kind of data corruption in motion Ever had a program crash, hang, or act oddly? That's how data corruption in memory surfaces. Of course, non-perfect programs (i.e. all of them) act the same way, which means that differentiating memory corruption from misbehaving programs is hard. Fixing the memory errors will result in more stable system, but it still won't be perfect.
justin66 9y ago
> haven't personally seen any kind of data corruption How would you know? Unless your computer use has been literally trouble-free (and all your archived data has been verified for correctness somehow), you can't know that none of your glitches over the past 17 years has been due to memory errors.
xenadu02 9y ago
The only reason ECC is costly is because Intel has a monopoly on the desktop/server chip market and they refuse to deploy ECC to consumer chips. The hardware is there, it's just fused disabled. If ECC were only the cost premium and we assumed a linear relationship then it should cost about 1/8 more than non-ECC DRAM. Unfortunately Intel's decisions have knock-on effects that ripple through the rest of the market. IIRC I saw somewhere that JDEC expects a future standard will require ECC to get acceptable error rates for all memory. At that point Intel won't have any choice.
dom0 9y ago
This is a bit like an inverse magic stone argument ("This stone repels tigers — How do I know it works? — I'm not seeing any tigers around here, do you?").
user5994461 9y ago
I have been seeing numerous memory corruption on many of my computers, including end of life memory sticks and motherboards that died before my eyes. At work, including my sysadmin years, up to a very long time ago on stupid summer jobs fixing computers, I have spent countless man*months to debug issues that were ultimately caused by memory errors. All of that could have been avoided by using ECC.

planteen 9y ago

Have you not had a computer do something unexpected in the last 17 years? A bit flip might look like a kernel or application crash. Have you ever saved a file that couldn't later be opened by an application? You probably blamed the application for being buggy, but it could have been an upset. Bit flips / upsets cause all sorts of odd behavior.

falcolas 9y ago

> haven't personally seen any kind of data corruption in motion Ever had a program crash, hang, or act oddly? That's how data corruption in memory surfaces. Of course, non-perfect programs (i.e. all of them) act the same way, which means that differentiating memory corruption from misbehaving programs is hard. Fixing the memory errors will result in more stable system, but it still won't be perfect.

justin66 9y ago

> haven't personally seen any kind of data corruption How would you know? Unless your computer use has been literally trouble-free (and all your archived data has been verified for correctness somehow), you can't know that none of your glitches over the past 17 years has been due to memory errors.

xenadu02 9y ago

The only reason ECC is costly is because Intel has a monopoly on the desktop/server chip market and they refuse to deploy ECC to consumer chips. The hardware is there, it's just fused disabled. If ECC were only the cost premium and we assumed a linear relationship then it should cost about 1/8 more than non-ECC DRAM. Unfortunately Intel's decisions have knock-on effects that ripple through the rest of the market. IIRC I saw somewhere that JDEC expects a future standard will require ECC to get acceptable error rates for all memory. At that point Intel won't have any choice.

dom0 9y ago

This is a bit like an inverse magic stone argument ("This stone repels tigers — How do I know it works? — I'm not seeing any tigers around here, do you?").

user5994461 9y ago

I have been seeing numerous memory corruption on many of my computers, including end of life memory sticks and motherboards that died before my eyes. At work, including my sysadmin years, up to a very long time ago on stupid summer jobs fixing computers, I have spent countless man*months to debug issues that were ultimately caused by memory errors. All of that could have been avoided by using ECC.