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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

The worst part is that adding ECC support should only increase the price of RAM by about 13%, which given that the RAM modules are about $50-$100 on most builds works out to $7-$13 to the total cost of the machine. Every machine should come with ECC. It's such cheap insurance. But because the chip manufacturers have to make more money by artificially segmenting the market almost nobody runs ECC on home machines.

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13% is huge in a low margin, highly competitive field. the price difference comes down more to economies of scale and less to artificial segmentation.

It is 13% of one of the cheaper components. Back in the 80s when all memory was expensive there was something of an excuse, but today we are needlessly trading the possibility for silent corruption over the multi-year lifetime of the machine for a couple of coffees. And worse, we make it really expensive and difficult for people who do want to reduce their risk by artificially segmenting the market.

Back in the 80s the need for ECC was much less because the gates were physically bigger and there was much less overall memory. Back then the chance of your computer having a bit flip was like one in a million per year, now with gigabytes of memory it's near 100% chance per year.

But it's 13% of a tiny component of an overall system. Not the same as 13% of the total cost.

Sure, if you're only buying memory modules, maybe you would go for the $7 savings. But as part of an overall system, nobody is even going to notice.

I notice so there goes your argument down the drain.

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