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>But if I open up an editor and write a document then that could be corrupted in RAM and then the corrupted data saved to disk. The document is likely to be mor

by ilyt 4y ago

>But if I open up an editor and write a document then that could be corrupted in RAM and then the corrupted data saved to disk. The document is likely to be more important than some ripped CDs or a git repo that I can download again. Devils advocate: if it is just some bits in character flipped it's entirely recoverable while flipping some bits in compressed stream for video would corrupt more.

rwmj 4y ago
Agreed. One problem with RAM errors (which I've actually experienced) is they are insidious. You probably won't notice them immediately so the error can be propagated, and they're very very difficult to diagnose if you do notice them. Back in the 90s we had a database server which had a stuck bit in memory normally mapped to the page cache. This caused sectors to be written to the backing software RAID which couldn't be read back in (because I think some checksum was corrupted when written and then failed when read back). It took an absolute age to diagnose this. I think I only worked it out by eliminating everything else.