On Fri, May 25, 2007 at 18:45:15 -0700,
Craig James <craig_james@emolecules.com> wrote:
> We're thinking of building some new servers. We bought some a while back
> that have ECC (error correcting) RAM, which is absurdly expensive compared
> to the same amount of non-ECC RAM. Does anyone have any real-life data
> about the error rate of non-ECC RAM, and whether it matters or not? In my
> long career, I've never once had a computer that corrupted memory, or at
> least I never knew if it did. ECC sound like a good idea, but is it
> solving a non-problem?
In the past when I purchased ECC ram it wasn't that much more expensive
than nonECC ram.
Wikipedia suggests a rule of thumb of one error per month per gigabyte,
though suggests error rates vary widely. They reference a paper that should
provide you with more background.