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The rest of this article is great. This, however, is absolute garbage and nonsense. The last thing you want is more regulations and "government certified systems". Take a look at the bullshit with age verification bills and operating systems.
> One thing that concerns me is the possibility of on-die ECC interacting with ECC on the motherboard and reducing it’s effectiveness DDR5 on-die ECC detects and corrects one-bit errors. It cannot detect two-bit errors, so it will miscorrect some of them into three-bit errors. My understanding is that the on-die error correction scheme is specifically specially designed such that the resulting three-bit errors are ma…
One nightmare scenario is a 3-bit error being detected as a correctable 1-bit error upstream, resulting in data corruption. I agree it’d be really nice to know that could never happen!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I last looked at this (a couple of years ago), it wasn't just the cost difference—the ECC memory available to purchase was also slower than non-ECC offerings, or at least cost significantly more if I actually wanted the same speed. At least for me, going ECC simply didn't make sense. Caveat that I was building a gaming PC at that time, I might have gone differently for a home server. And, this was before the mem…
Yes, ECC DIMMs are available only for the memory speeds guaranteed to work by the manufacturers of CPUs, like Intel and AMD, e.g. for up to DDR5-5600 in UDIMMs or DDR5-6400 in RDIMMs. The "gaming" DIMMs are available in much greater speeds, which are "overclocked" speeds, i.e. there exists absolutely no guarantee from Intel or AMD that they work at the advertised speed, even if they frequently do work. However, with…
Without ECC, nobody knows if their memory is working or not. Regardless whether it is running a standard JEDEC speed or an overclocked one.
> We need ECC RAM to be more widely used. Ideally we would have some government action to force this given the ongoing cost.... The rest of this article is great. This, however, is absolute garbage and nonsense. The last thing you want is more regulations and "government certified systems". Take a look at the bullshit with age verification bills and operating systems.
"Ideally we would have some government action to force this given the ongoing cost to society in corrupted data" Why is it so often Australia with the "We must force unnecessary things upon people" attitude?
This would be a consumer protection law like any other such law. Forcing the vendors to sell only products that do what they are advertised cannot be considered in any way as "forcing unnecessary things upon people". Any computer without ECC memory is a computer that does not compute from time to time and you have no idea when that happens. Originally, any IBM PC or compatible had memory error detection. All this pro…
So are the computers with ECC memory. It's not an absolute protection either.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the attitude that needs to change. If RAM is 25% of the system cost (say for a home server in your example), then the cost for ECC is 3% of the system cost. There is no world where accepting data corruption in order to save 3% cost is a reasonable tradeoff. ECC should be standard, period.
> There is no world where accepting data corruption in order to save 3% cost is a reasonable tradeoff. It is if you're doing something where corruption is detectable after the fact, and happens rarely enough that redoing affected work adds less than 3% overhead.
Interesting article, and I agree that ECC needs to be more widely available. But I think this is a major overreach: > We need ECC RAM to be more widely used. Ideally we would have some government action to force this given the ongoing cost to society in corrupted data and lost time due to RAM hardware errors. I think that at minimum we need sufficient taxes on non-ECC RAM (and EC4 RAM for DDR5) to make it more expens…
Important data should probably be worked on and stored with error-correcting codes, in addition to the hardware-provided ones. The Btrfs mention in TFA suggests that maintaining integrity of the Btrfs metadata is not considered part of the job description of Btrfs, but perhaps it should be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's a pattern that reinforces itself, as a nanny state develops it's opinion of it's people worsens and it's more willing to use force to compel them.
Right, the opinion shifting to the people being unworthy of uncorrupted data unless they’re wealthy enough to pay the artificial extortion price for integrity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. Everyone agrees that real ECC is more robust, and production servers of course run it. But it seems to me that if most RAM bitflips are in the module itself (rather than in transmission to CPU), then on-die ECC could in theory make the probability of a bitflip in practice so low that for things like home servers it isn’t worth the price premium for real ECC. But without data on this, everyone is just speculati…
This is the attitude that needs to change. If RAM is 25% of the system cost (say for a home server in your example), then the cost for ECC is 3% of the system cost. There is no world where accepting data corruption in order to save 3% cost is a reasonable tradeoff. ECC should be standard, period.
Got ECC udimm for my ddr4 server and was surprised to see it picking up errors occasionally (once every couple months). Likely from a weakness in one of the sticks. This far it’s always corrected it though so opted to keep them anyway (nobody wants to be minus 32gb in these trying memory times) With normal sticks I’d not have know that there is a potential issue.
With non-ECC RAM running a memory test and getting any errors means it’s not stable. The memory tests run at maximum bandwidth constantly so a few days of full bandwidth memory testing might produce as many transmissions as your months of regular server use. Seeing bit errors (even if corrected) means something is not right.
The ECC can correct it for a while but I would want to RMA that stick if it’s in warranty.