3 ms·
Don’t do it! For (your own) source code or valuables, you need ECC memory and a capacitor on the power supply for your storage device which, by the way, should
by vaxman 6y ago
Don’t do it! For (your own) source code or valuables, you need ECC memory and a capacitor on the power supply for your storage device which, by the way, should not be prone to corruption when the device is vibrated a little too hard causing electrical shorts in the SD-card or USB connectors! Backups aren’t the answer either, in fact backups can trigger RAM errors (especially with encryption and compression enabled) that may only ever be occurring during backups leading to..silently corrupted backups.
- gambiting 6y agoIs this missing an /s at the end? All of this is true, but come on, 99% of regular people don't need any of this stuff. And pretty much no one actually needs ECC memory outside of professional setting.
- vaxman 6y agoI tell yah there is nothing sadder than some poor CPA who has lost all of his client files and some of his baby's pictures when the Fusion Drive in his iMac failed (what a horrible piece of technology) only to discover that their backups are all bad because whenever the program kicked-in, it caused a failure mode on their cheap-azz third-party RAM DIMM that was otherwise unnoticed due to lack of ECC support. So when you say "pretty much no one" are you missing an /s at the end?
- gambiting 6y agoLet's combine two facts - virtually no consumer desktop, laptop, phone or tablet ships with ECC memory, yet somehow, nearly everyone is successfully using their computing devices for both pleasure and work, including backups. Yes, failures happen, but they are so incredibly rare that recommending people at home to buy ECC ram is in the same league as recommending getting a double PSU or a UPS for home use to prevent data loss in my mind. Technically correct, but in practice you're reducing the chances of losing your data from 0.0001% to 0.0001% or something equally negligible. There are actual, real, impact steps that anyone can take to improve their data safety - ECC memory is not one of them.
- vaxman 6y agoI don’t know where to find such data to support your “facts”. Perhaps Geek Genius Bar? 0.0001%? Did you just pull that out of your ass?
- gambiting 6y agoWell, instead of trying to find data to support what I said, try to find data to support what you did maybe? My assertion is simple - virtually no consumer computing devices come with ECC ram, therefore it follows that ECC ram is not necessary to use, play with and work with computers every day. If your assertion is the opposite of that, then I'm willing to see data proving it. And of course 0.0001% was pulled out of my ass.
- jjeaff 6y agoThere are good reasons not to use a raspberry pi as a server. But lack of ecc ram is not one of them.
- vaxman 6y agoReally? They discovered quarks at my university (I wrote the kernel mode code to handle the data bursts from our Cyclotron on sub-MIPS processors) and I have four decades of systems experience. So, what are your qualifications? Hmm?
- vaxman 6y agocosmic/solar radiation (stray particles), voltage regulation and thermal conditions are the main causes of RAM errors. downvotes are popularity contest on Hacker “News”
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jmnicolas 6y agoI hear about ECC since 15 years now but I have yet to encounter a case where I had data corruption (on any machine ECC or not). It's not that I don't believe, but the occurrence seems to be ultra rare.
- vaxman 6y agoThe Sun was in a relative quiet period for most of those 15 years. Intel removed ECC from the consumer products to keep businesses from buying them --they didn't count on an entire generation of Computer Scientists being wiped out in the dot-com crash and the replacements getting lucky while not knowing any better. All of the great masters (cough) know better, such as the architects of AWS (it is 100% ECC), Microsoft, Apple and other environments that were less affected by the loss of key personnel to the Crash. But keep down votin' --love it!