[ale] call me stupid but.......

[Charles Shapiro]

Ooh, now this is real interesting. I thought that the real cause of soft
errors in memory was trace radioactivity in the chip carriers and
surroundings, but the latest research shows I was wrong. Here's a fun
link which gives some data indicating that soft RAM errors are indeed
caused by cosmic rays.

http://www.crystallineconcepts.com/ram/ram-soft.html

-- CHS

On Tue, 2002-07-02 at 21:14, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> This is especially useful for really-high-RAM systems (>1GB) because the
> number of bits being stored becomes significant compared to the
> estimated probability of a spontaneous bit-flip (cosmic-ray-induced)
> over the operational life of the machine.
> 
> - Jeff 
> 
> On Tue, 2002-07-02 at 02:50, Jordi S. Bunster wrote:
> > 7/2/02 2:30:40 AM, Stephen Turner <artic_knight at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > 
> > >whats ecc ram? ive been looking at ddr, i think what i got is 2100
> > >(266mhz) but whats this ecc ddr ram? whats ecc? and where do i find out
> > >about such terms that i might not know of just yet?
> > 
> > ECC stands for Error Checking Code, As far as I can remember. It can detect almost any single bit 
> > error per page in your data, and some two bit ones, and correct it at the hardware level, before 
> > the OS (or microprocessor, for that matter) even touches the data.
> > 
> > Most serious UNIX servers ship with ECC RAM. It may be more expensive, but it really gives you 
> > and extra bit of reliability depending on your needs. Some architectures (anyone, please correct 
> > me on these, potentially wrong statement) only allow ECC RAM, like the workstations from Sun, for 
> > example.
> > 
> > If you're interested in buying it, avoid "ECC compatible" memory. As Eric says, this is the 
> > marketing term for "We're too cheap to implement ECC". :)
> > 
> >  -- Jordi
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
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> 
> 
> 
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