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ECC RAM should be a human right

dmitrybrant.com

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Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#111

Post by mutagen »

chatmasta wrote: post #47

> 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…

Windows has a memory test tool built in called the Windows Memory Diagnostic. It runs on the next reboot to fully test system memory.

Apple Diagnostics check memory as well, though maybe not as thoroughly as the Microsoft or memtest86 do (multiple passes).

I've had memory errors that only appeared on two of eight passes through the whole memory test overnight. They certainly caused occasional issues with games though.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#112

Post by leguminous »

deadbunny wrote: post #65
PaulKeeble wrote: post #3

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

What's really annoying is that the current generation of Intel CPUs support ECC, they just don't implement it in consumer chipsets. You can get working ECC with a W680 motherboard, but those are very expensive and availability is slim.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#113

Post by solomatov »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #3

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.

I suspect that other methods of CPU segmentation, i.e. RAM channels, and PCIe lane are artificial in a similar way, i.e. cost of producing a die for a CPU is more or less the same, but pro CPUs have more of them.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#114

Post by wongarsu »

chatmasta wrote: post #47

> 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 mentioned memtest86 tool sounds quite useful - so useful, in fact, that it seems it should be part of the operating system

Windows has the Memory Diagnostics Tool, and your linux probably has a memory tester option in the boot manager. Of course you have to run them manually, which is a bit bothersome. Thee have been attempts at kernel patches for linux to test memory in the background, going at least back to 2005 [1], but there were probably some before that. The simpler versions just test whatever memory is free, the more sophisticated aproaches try to move stuff in physical memory to free each region periodically so it can be tested. But in the end it's spending CPU cycles on a problem most users never experience.

1:https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.linux.development.system...

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#115

Post by whydid »

veidr wrote: post #108
NelsonMinar wrote: post #5

Still wild to me we lost ECC RAM. It used to be standard in PCs. Does Apple hardware come with ECC RAM? If anyone could make it make sense as a business, it's them.

Apple does not make any Macs with ECC RAM any more. This was the reason I always used Mac Pro machines, and at the end, iMac Pro: those machines had ECC RAM, and incidentally always seemed more stable over months and years than the MacBook Pros I had, which didn’t. (Of course, there are a lot of reasons why a laptop might crash or malfunction an order of magnitude more than a desktop machine. The benefits of ECC RAM…

The 2019 MacPro with Xeon has ECC RAM.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#116

Post by phendrenad2 »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #67
phendrenad2 wrote: post #50

This is just unscientific nonsense. > Memory manufacturers assure us that desktop RAM is so reliable that it doesn’t need ECC, that the probability of bit flip events is so low that it’s not worth the extra “cost” of ECC Yea, and they are right.

I'm not very familiar with hardware architecture. Could you explain why you disagree?

ECC requires extra circuitry, and that results in more cost, also more testing cost, and also more failed chips (due to more complexity).

Most people have very little need for ECC. The author didn't even know that they wanted ECC until they were unlucky enough to get a stick of RAM that failed, and failed in such a way that the OS booted, but a file silently corrupted (not that common, because if a chip fails it usually doesn't silently fail like that).

The author is basically asking for ECC for free.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#117

Post by veidr »

whydid wrote: post #115
veidr wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple does not make any Macs with ECC RAM any more. This was the reason I always used Mac Pro machines, and at the end, iMac Pro: those machines had ECC RAM, and incidentally always seemed more stable over months and years than the MacBook Pros I had, which didn’t. (Of course, there are a lot of reasons why a laptop might crash or malfunction an order of magnitude more than a desktop machine. The benefits of ECC RAM…

The 2019 MacPro with Xeon has ECC RAM.

Oh, my bad; I thought they didn't sell that any more. Indeed, that machine has ECC, (as do all Mac Pros, IIRC... so it will be interesting to see what happens when the Apple Silicon version of the Mac Pro is released).

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#118

Post by kiririn »

derkades wrote: post #62
laweijfmvo wrote: post #40

I've never had ECC memory to my knowledge. What have I been missing out on, in practice? Can we confidently say that x% of my past BSOD were the direct consequence?

You may have been lucky enough to never experienced a bad module. But when it does happen, it can have major consequences (losing data, having to reinstall an OS). All while being totally preventable.

Not enough people realise that the driving reason for ECC in home systems is this, not random once-in-a-blue-moon bit flips

I’ll always buy ECC after multiple data loss events from ram suddenly going bad, worth every penny to have ECC ring alarm bells rather than put 2+2 together after random BSODs and silent corruption

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#120

Post by diarrhea »

ls65536 wrote: post #102
giardia wrote: post #84

Oh god this gives me flashbacks. I never knew how bad corruption was on home computers until I started using git annex on a multi-terabyte file collection. No matter which computer or disk I used, it would inevitably happen. Then I started to wonder how much corruption had crept in before I was using git annex and never noticed it. I've basically given up on maintaining large digital media collections for long term p…

How about storing the data on a filesystem that performs data checksumming, also configured in a RAID-1-like mirroring profile to enable any corruption to also be corrected? Filesystems like ZFS or BTRFS could be a good choice here.

One of the prime prerequisites of e.g. zfs actually is using ECC RAM.

I’m running btrfs with integrity checks, in RAID 1 so it can automatically heal. Yet it’s non-ECC and therefore still has this gaping Achilles heel.

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