Post #2122051
2026-05-02 12:08 UTC
Replies (2)
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@kata1yst@sh.itjust.works 2026-05-02 12:27
I respect your perspective and personal experience, and I'm not trying to convince you (I'm not even downvoting you, as it's not a disagreement button). I'm trying to convince whoever might come along and read this that the small extra price is worth it if their computer is going to hold data dear to them and be running 24x7. ECC is extremely good at covering cosmic ray bitflips, which happen with extreme regularity on software that runs and modifies data on the fly- server software. Yes, even home run stuff. That's just playing Russian roulette, it probably won't break anything, but why take the risk [at least 10 times every day](https://agentcalc.com/cosmic-ray-bit-flip-probability-calculator)? It's also great at catching failing RAM sticks and preventing them from doing horrible things to every bit of data running through them. This is the failure ECC caught for me at home twice. I have only 2.5 decades in the enterprise server and software space, I won't claim to your 4. But I know I wouldn't take that risk at work, and I value my home data more rather than less. I'm not a researcher or even a particularly well practiced rhetorician, so here's probably a [much more convincing argument](https://danluu.com/why-ecc/). Or [this](https://simeononsecurity.com/articles/the-role-of-ecc-memory-in-mitigating-data-corruption/) perhaps.
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@amorpheus@lemmy.world 2026-05-02 17:36
Adding another data point pro-ECC: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-ECC > Torvalds went on his lengthy post to say, "The "modern DRAM is so reliable that it doesn't need ECC" was always a bedtime story for children that had been dropped on their heads a bit too many times. Yes, I'm pissed off about it. You can find me complaining about this literally for decades now.