[Nottingham] Spontaneous errors in RAM - How often?

[Martin]

Michael Erskine wrote:
> On Thursday 20 July 2006 11:45, ForkBombFluf wrote:
>>On Thu, 20 Jul 2006, Martin wrote:
>>
>>>For 1GByte of PC RAM (non-ECC), what is the probability of a bit-flip
>>>due to radiation, cosmic rays, or whatever?
[---]
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_RAM#Errors_and_error_correction

Good link, thanks.

"A reasonable rule of thumb is to expect one bit error, per month, per
gigabyte of memory. Actual error rates vary widely.[ecc]"

Errrrrr - ouch!


Looks like ECC is a good idea (on Linux systems at least).

Cheers,
Martin

[ecc] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_RAM#endnote_ecc_ratesa

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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