4 ms·

I've had ECC RAM once, it failed and ECC caught it before it could damage any documents. ECC memory also keeps a log of how many corrections it's made. In a lon

I've had ECC RAM once, it failed and ECC caught it before it could damage any documents. ECC memory also keeps a log of how many corrections it's made. In a long running machine that gets hot there _are_ bit flips and they _are_ significant. Especially if you're spent days working on a video file and don't have the technical skills to fix it in a hex editor. I've also had memory issues on non-ECC machines, it's a lot harder to diagnose and much more frustrating. ECC memory should be standard in modern machines IMO.

thomastjeffery 9y ago
> Especially if you're spent days working on a video file And didn't keep a backup. Most serious software will make incremental copies to avoid that problem too. Seriously, hardware failures are just as likely. ECC is useful, but isn't worth it for the price unless you actually can't be fault tolerant in any way.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Backups and ECC address completely different problems. Backup systems will happily store corrupted files into your backup disks. ZFS-style filesystem level checksums won’t catch many problems either, because they only check to see if what you wrote is the same as what was read back. If the data was corrupted in memory, it’ll happily pass you back corrupted data.