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Comment by freeqaz | Hacker News Reader

I bought ECC RAM for my laptop and it definitely was about 4x the price. It's valuable to me for a few reasons -- peace of mind being a big one.

Bit flips happen and are real. I really wish ECC was plentiful and not brutally expensive!

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This is the first time I hear about a laptop that supports ECC memory. Could you please share the make and model?

-My boss has a Xeon Dell - a 7550, methinks - luggable.

It is filled to the gunwales with ECC RAM.

Cost him the equivalent of $7k or so. Eeek.

I have a Dell Precision 5520 (chassis of an XPS 15) which has a Xeon and ECC memory.

Finding a memory upgrade seems difficult though.

I was looking at getting the Xeon-based NUC recently and one of the reasons I decided against it was that ECC SO-DIMMs seem to be a really marginal product. If you want ECC, something that takes full-size DIMMs seems much easier to buy memory for.

Lenovo has Xeon laptops[0], and technically Intel used to support ECC on i3 (and celeron, etc.)

0: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-p/Thi...

Lenovo (P series) and HP workstation models also support ECC

Note that the price is mostly due to market segmentation, in your case most of it by the laptop vendor (of course some for Intel, but not that much compared to the laptop vendor)

Xeon with ECC are not that overpriced compared with similar Core without. Likewise, RAM sticks with ECC are cheap to produce (basically just one more chip to populate per side per module). Likewise soldered RAM would simply add maybe $10 or $20 of extra chips.

For the price, it made more sense for me to buy an R630 and populate it with a few less expensive, higher capacity ECC RDIMMs. I don't really need ECC as a local feature, so this lets me run on the mobile I want.

You should be able to check logs for corrected errors, right?

I'm guessing you won't find any.

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