[lotuseclat79]

DRAM study turns assumptions about errors upside down.

If you thought that quality among DRAM DIMMs was evenly distributed, or that most DRAM errors are not due to hardware problems, Google has proven you wrong. The industry's first large-scale, real-world study of DRAM error rates turns common assumptions about DIMMs on their head.

The conventional wisdom on DRAM error rates is that errors are rare, and the majority of the errors that do occur are so-called "soft errors"—randomly corrupted bits that have been flipped by incoming cosmic rays. But a recent, large-scale study of DRAM errors released by Google turns this wisdom on its head, and in doing so reinforces the importance of error correction coding (ECC) and regular hardware replacement for datacenter machines.

-- Tom

[JohnWill]

I've always been a fan of ECC, but most new systems make it almost impossible to use it, and buying ECC memory nowadays it very expensive!