Another important perspective of ECC memory is whether your machine can properly respond to the interrupt. ECC without reporting and handling is not a working ECC. I have been using Ryzen machines with AsRock motherboards and the Linux EDAC driver reports errors correctly (verified by overclocking the memory sticks to the edge). On the other hand, I owned a Dell Precision mobile workstation with Xeon W-11955M processor and ECC SODIMM sticks. However, since its EDAC driver never really lands in the mainline kernel, I won't get any ECC reports, so the corresponding process that has a bit flipped will not get killed.
Non-ECC memory corrupted my hard drive image [video]
131–140 of 161 posts
Re: Non-ECC memory corrupted my hard drive image [video]
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see this a lot but I really don’t think it was/is that simplistic. It’s added complexity and cost for something that rarely would benefit most consumers. Now, you can argue that the complexity and cost is a nonissue on modern setups and I would probably agree. But Intel has long had desktop grade hardware with ECC support. The 440GX chipset supported ECC and I ran a Dell GX1 SFF with 768MB of ECC PC100 for yeeeears…
Just because the chipset supported it doesn't mean the motherboard did, and there's little incentive for a motherboard company that makes server boards (OEM or under their own brand, or both) to sell ECC motherboards for the desktop consumer market, and integrators will not want to harm their "workstation" sales if "SOHO" systems are capable of ECC. BTW, AMD's Ryzen CPUs and "Pro" APUs (APU = cpu with integrated grap…
Right, but the motherboard for a lot of systems from that era were a nonissue. If the /chipset/ supported it like with the 440 line then most boards would handle it.
And, by your own suggestion, this isn’t a fault of Intel and more of OEMs sucking.
I mean, I guess Intel could have tried mandating it or something but meh
Re: Non-ECC memory corrupted my hard drive image [video]
#133We don't have ECC mainly because Intel has long been hostile to "consumer" access to ECC. Apparently this was conceived as a market segmentation scheme: people outfitting servers could get ECC when they pay a huge premium. They would thereby not be tempted to cheap out and buy consumer-grade equipment, otherwise wholly adequate to meet all their needs at a radically cheaper price. That we cannot get laptops or even d…
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Re: Non-ECC memory corrupted my hard drive image [video]
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taking a quick glace at the articles, I think it's the opposite, DDR5 protects data at rest only, because they want to make the chips so unreliable it can't work without it, not the bus. But in practice, it will probably be more reliable than DDR4 without ECC, since now you need 2 cosmic ray flips, or 1 plus a manufacturing defect flip, and the defect flips will probably be uncommon-ish. It's too bad data in flight i…
The problem with the DDR5 approach is there's no reporting mechanism, so while it will reduce the error rate of a marginal module, it doesn't let you know so you can replace it. In my experience with ECC modules, a module with some errors is a lot more likely to get more errors than one that's operating with zero errors.
According to this post on Reddit there is reporting: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/qjhvjg/are_ddr5_e...
But even without it, it would be no worse than DDR4 with no ECC at all, where the only indication of bad ram is just that it crashes or memtest fails.
It sounds like they intend to make the chips all slightly bad and then correct it, so a few errors here and there might not indicate a true bad stick that needs replacement anymore.
Re: Non-ECC memory corrupted my hard drive image [video]
#135This problem has no ultimate solution. I've seen all components flip bits, CPUs, networking cards, RAM, most often you just can't know for sure what did it. You can remedy it a bit (like with ECC), but ultimately there will always be corruption if you process hundreds of petabytes of data. Get used to it, your computer executes an instruction with a probability extremely close to 1, but not equal to 1. Deep in the ar…
If this is the same issue at the same well known tech company that I recall, it wasn't a hardware failure but a case of undefined behaviour. The existing code used memset to initialize a struct with zeroes, then someone else added a virtual method (to it? to a base? or member?) which caused the struct to grow a vptr. Now the memset was clobbering the vptr. They compiled this program with some form of link time optimization and the compiler emitted assembly that tested the vptr against one of two known values, and when it didn't match (because it was NULL) it must be the other known value! Either way it didn't use the vtable, it just made direct calls to the appropriate member functions, which led to a "drop table". As part of resolution it also led to https://reviews.llvm.org/rL130299 for compile-time checking and also UBSan's `-fsanitize=vptr` for runtime checking.
Re: Non-ECC memory corrupted my hard drive image [video]
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it happens to me, it is happening to untold others, too. Thus, frequently. "Infrequently" would mean I had not heard of it, or that I heard only of isolated instances, well publicized.
I feel like I just fell into a bucket of logical fallacies.
We all have no choice but to sample imperfect information. You can no more than pretend better.
Re: Non-ECC memory corrupted my hard drive image [video]
#137We don't have ECC mainly because Intel has long been hostile to "consumer" access to ECC. Apparently this was conceived as a market segmentation scheme: people outfitting servers could get ECC when they pay a huge premium. They would thereby not be tempted to cheap out and buy consumer-grade equipment, otherwise wholly adequate to meet all their needs at a radically cheaper price. That we cannot get laptops or even d…
> That we cannot get laptops or even desk machines with ECC The Xeon series of laptop processors does support ECC just at a quite large premium.
Yet, actually providing ECC costs practically nothing. RAM could cost something less than 12.5% more, for the extra bits. If end-to-end, the bus might have a few more traces.
Re: Non-ECC memory corrupted my hard drive image [video]
#138I watched the full video. It was long but very informative. The humor at times made up for the length and the presenter showed a lot of deep knowledge that most people won't have. My biggest gripe is that they just didn't try replacing the RAM sticks in the first place. I get that they wanted to do a root cause analysis, but geez the time and patience they had to do all those memory tests. No wonder they did a video…
> ...but try finding some high performance 16GB sticks of ECC DDR4 RAM like what you'll see on gaming computers. Here ya go: https://nemixram.com/16gb-ddr4-3200-pc4-25600-ecc-udimm-2rx8... It doesn't have pretty lights on it, but it does seem to be in the same speed class that gets called "gaming RAM" by a _whole_ bunch of retailers.
For real. I am going to have to look into this more. While it isn't by a global retail manufacturer, the price is like a fraction of most other RAM so I am curious. Does NewEgg or Amazon sell it directly, and if not why not?
Re: Non-ECC memory corrupted my hard drive image [video]
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see this a lot but I really don’t think it was/is that simplistic. It’s added complexity and cost for something that rarely would benefit most consumers. Now, you can argue that the complexity and cost is a nonissue on modern setups and I would probably agree. But Intel has long had desktop grade hardware with ECC support. The 440GX chipset supported ECC and I ran a Dell GX1 SFF with 768MB of ECC PC100 for yeeeears…
I miss the BX chipset. The last PC that wasn't a complete piece of shit I had was a 440BX chipset P3.
I loved my 440* chipset systems. I miss them, too, lol. My last one died due to a damn screw driver slip. sobs
Re: Non-ECC memory corrupted my hard drive image [video]
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That we cannot get laptops or even desk machines with ECC, and so have them crash frequently, is seen as a trivial side effect of the strategy I’m not sure what you mean by “frequently”, but my non-ECC machines definitely do not crash “frequently”. > before MS, a program crashing was grounds for a refund Source?
I see a ton of replies here. I am a tech user with thousands of terabytes stored locally. Most of those terabytes are mirrored in the cloud. In all of those situations I've never actually had any corruption related to memory or storage. I have 932gb in PICTURES ffs. I get the claimed need for EEC, but yet I don't. I own a number of web properties and regularly update logos, software packages, html files, PHP files, r…
You can be pretty sure that you have some corrupt bits