3 ms·
> It's the same reason why you probably don't need RAID on a computer with one or two disks No, it is not "the same reason" Disks have ECC, even consumer hard
by ilyt 3y ago
> It's the same reason why you probably don't need RAID on a computer with one or two disks
No, it is not "the same reason"
Disks have ECC, even consumer hard drives have checksummed blocks, that's how you get media errors detected. RAM does not. Well, technically with DDR5 it has internal one but it does not give any feedback to the machine so you might not know your RAM has any problems.
> It's why you don't need an automatic fire suppression system in or homelab
But you want smoke sensors. ECC is the smoke sensor too
> That, and most memory problems in PCs tend to be from dodgy overclocking or just bad sticks rather than cosmic rays. ECC won't really save you from that.
But it will tell you the problem
Very ignorant take
- marginalia_nu 3y ago> Disks have ECC, even consumer hard drives have checksummed blocks, that's how you get media errors detected. RAM does not. Well, technically with DDR5 it has internal one but it does not give any feedback to the machine so you might not know your RAM has any problems. Sure, and disks have random errors even with error correction. Adding hamming codes just makes errors less likely and easier to detect, but they aren't fool proof, in ram or on disk or anywhere else. The protection offered is a bit questionable because they rely on the very sketchy assumption that errors are statistically independent events, which is rarely how storage errors work. > But it will tell you the problem > Very ignorant take Hardware isn't perfect. No matter how much error correction you pile onto it, you will still have errors and some cases will still be undetectable. It's a matter of pushing the rate of errors into an acceptable range, as a pure cost-benefit tradeoff, statistics through and through.