71–80 of 146 posts
ECC has been used as an artificial market segmentation mechanism for a long time and it needs to come to an end. RAM just like SSDs and HDDs ought to have some amount of self protection against basic errors, all places where data is stored even for short periods needs this.
> ECC has been used by Intel as an artificial market segmentation mechanism FTFY
> It was the worst-case scenario for RAM failure: bit flip errors that get written back to the disk. I discovered that several video files that I had been editing had corrupted bits, and were no longer usable. What a horrible failure mode! Kudos to the OP for even thinking to investigate this. The mentioned memtest86 tool sounds quite useful - so useful, in fact, that it seems it should be part of the operating syste…
The OS layer is probably the hardest place to do online application data integrity checking: it's too low level to know what data is important and which parts will change and why in a way which allows checksumming to work effectively and efficiently, but too high above the hardware to be able to check the integrity of memory without a massive performance penalty (especially when it comes to how memory is moving in and out of caches). Most solutions work at a higher level in the application itself or lower level with ECC RAM as mentioned in the article.
My big complaint is actually digging through the mess of MB/RAM/BIOS documentation to actually verify that I have the right combination of processor/motherboard/memory for ECC AND TEST IT'S WORKING . AMD seems to support ECC on some consumer-level chipsets, but it's a nightmare to sort it all out and verify that all the bits are actually functioning properly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ECC has been used by Intel as an artificial market segmentation mechanism FTFY
And AMD, and Nvidia.
I never did figure out a way to verify that the ECC is working/if it is able to report errors (to the kernel?). It was also a bit hard finding the right ram, but there’s a brand called Nemix that I found. I was a bit sketched out by the brand, but the chips themselves were Micron.
ECC RAM would actually be a boon to everyone, including gamers. ECC means not only that you know precisely when you've gone too far with overclocking, but potentially allows overclocking a bit further, relying on that some amount of trouble can now be tolerated. It also means you're not going to break your OS by playing with this stuff. Memory corruption carries a huge risk of disk corruption, which can mean things l…
I doubt that would actually be useful with overclocking. I don't know the arch of the modern PC well enough to say with 100% confidence, but on embedded arches, the RAM has the parity bits checked when they get placed on the bus. If the error happens on data retrieval(or was already present) , then the ECC saves you, but if it happen anywhere else... not really? I don't know if.. ALU's for example automatically inclu…
Assuming stationary processes this is pretty nice. Maybe bump back 5% for margin.
I believe that is is a right. Every machine I've built in the last ~12 years had had ECC. Nobody is trying to take that ability away from me. I treat my machine as a "workstation". I run several VMs. I keep my machines for a few years. I clean the filters periodically. Do game machines need ECC? I'd say no. They are optimized for cost-performance. The worse that can happen with a memory error is a lost game.
> It was the worst-case scenario for RAM failure: bit flip errors that get written back to the disk. I discovered that several video files that I had been editing had corrupted bits, and were no longer usable. What a horrible failure mode! Kudos to the OP for even thinking to investigate this. The mentioned memtest86 tool sounds quite useful - so useful, in fact, that it seems it should be part of the operating syste…
Unfortunately DDR5 is going to complicate rather than fix the story.
I have had a scenario where the machine failed to boot at 7200 until I reseated the memory, so there's definitely a limit on the physical media being hit.