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For someone who just doesn't know -- what are the useful use cases for ECC? Who benefits from it?
by boplicity 4y ago
For someone who just doesn't know -- what are the useful use cases for ECC? Who benefits from it?
- kahrl 4y agoNuclear engineers and anyone else who want bragging rights.
- Espressosaurus 4y agoYou benefit from cosmic rays not randomly corrupting your data in memory.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 7speter 4y agoTheres an actual phenomenon known as bitrot, where over time, copies and storage, files degrade by having their bits flip. This can apparently accelerate during the process of a file being transferred (whether from the internet to a drive or ram or to a drive or vice versa), bits can be misread because of the speed and breadth they come in at. Ecc prevents this.
- trynumber9 4y agoUnfortunately, it doesn't prevent it but reduces the chance. Even with ECC memory regular data integrity checks (or scrubs) are vital for detecting bit rot.
- sliken 4y agoTrue, but those data integrity checks are built into the motherboard/BIOS and happen without any user (or OS) intervention.
- uni_rule 4y agoMostly hosting but many find the lockout of it to "workstation" chipsets annoyingly arbitrary particularly when many off-the-shelf AM4 motherboards can use ECC memory without issue. The inability to use it elsewhere is comparatively arbitrary.
- sliken 4y agoPart of it is to track and fix the occasional bit flip. Said flips can cause data corruption, crashing processes, and crashing machines. However it's also very useful to just know when a particular failure causes issues. So you know that the 3rd of 4 dimms died, instead of tracking down frequent crashed that might be power supply, motherboard, cpu, any dimm, etc. Linus Torvalds recently lost time thinking he had an unreliable kernel when a 2+ year old dimm just went bad.