3 ms·
I know what it does, but I still don’t care (so long as it costs money or even 1% performance). It’s a tradeoff between money/performance and the frequency of
by alkonaut 6y ago
I know what it does, but I still don’t care (so long as it costs money or even 1% performance).
It’s a tradeoff between money/performance and the frequency of crashes, corruption etc.
Bit rot is just one of many threats to my data. Backups take care of that as well as other threats like theft, fire, accidental deletion.
This is similar to my reasoning around the recent side channel attacks on intel CPUs. If I had a choice I’d like to run with max performance without the security fixes even though it would be less secure. Not because I don’t care about security but because 1% or 5% perf is a lot and I’d rather simply avoid doing anything security critical on the machine entirely than take that hit.
- mark-r 6y agoBackups can't fix what was already corrupted when it was written to disk.
- louwrentius 6y ago> Bit rot is just one of many threats to my data. Backups take care of that as well as other threats like theft, fire, accidental deletion. No, that's the big mistake people make: backups just backup bit-rotted data, until it is too late and the last good version is rotated out and lost forever.
- alkonaut 6y agoI’m aware. But the risk is extremely small (and 99.9% of important data is not created on the machine but goes directly from e.g iOS camera to backup). My desktop machine is basically a gaming rig with disposable data. Hence the “performance over integrity”. I also never rotate anything out. Every version of everything is in the backups. Storage is that cheap these days.
- xxs 6y ago>My desktop machine is basically a gaming rig ...unlike all the accountant machines which are just standard desktop grade ones that have invoices entered from their keyboards. >Hence the “performance over integrity”. If anything ECC would be better for performance, as it'd allow to clock memory higher. It's a mystery how Intel has managed to convince people ECC = enterprise/server market. The real cost of ECC is 1/8 more memory (and datatraces on the motherboard)... and if anything, virtually all intel cpus have the needed support/transistors in the memory controller, it's just desktop variants have that part fused off on purpose.
- alkonaut 6y agoThat's more a hypothetical "if ECC was common enough that the products would exist" scenario. The current status is that it mostly doesn't exist outside OEM parts. Searching an online retailer for ECC brings me hundreds of results for "non-ECC" RAM. When they occasionally have 1-2 products with ECC, they aren't as aggressively binned as the non-ECC sticks. They'll have higher latencies and lower clock frequencies. Basically: you'll need to accept gambling on being able to overclock your ECC RAM.
- xxs 6y agoECC could have been common, if there was a meaningful CPU support for. Intel basically did - "you need Xeon to do exactly what an i7 does + ECC, it just costs 5 times more... We just fused the ECC part of memory controller of i7, so buy Xeon." The entire discussion is about why ECC is not common and why ECC matters. There is no technical reason for ECC to be uncommon aside purposed market segmentation. Of course, there is no intrinsic availability of ECC udimms for the retail market currently, however that does mean ECC has no use or benefits for a small extra production cost.
- alkonaut 6y agoCompletely agree. I'm not avoding it because I don't think it' s worth it in theory. It's because it'snot worth it in practice, right now. Because you basically either have to buy something slower, or can't buy it at all.