[Nottingham] Spontaneous errors in RAM - How often?

[ForkBombFluf]

On Thu, 20 Jul 2006, Martin wrote:

> Here's a good question for tonight:
>
> For 1GByte of PC RAM (non-ECC), what is the probability of a bit-flip
> due to radiation, cosmic rays, or whatever?
>
> In other words, for very large amounts of PC RAM, how important is it to
> use ECC RAM?

I'd be very intrigued to hear the answer to this one too, we just had to 
purchase ram for a new server and were faced with the same question.  We 
were unable to find very little useful information on the web regarding 
this, and no real statistics.

In the end, we just bought non-ECC, as we already had one server with 
ECC and another server without and they seemed to be equal in reliability 
as far as we could tell, but we're only talking about 4.5GB here too.

Cheers,

-Stef