Cosmic Rays Flipping Bits
johndcook.com
johndcook.com
It seems to me that if particles flipping bits is now becoming a significant problem then perhaps we ought to make memory with full error correction as a matter of course as once we did long ago (it makes sense to things properly even if it costs a little more).
(Incidentally, the memory/particle debate was had in the 1980s and supporters of parity checking like me eventually lost out (as memory seemed reliable enough). I've never doubted that error/parity checking would eventually come back when chip densities reached a certain point. Perhaps we're getting close to that point now.)
Every CPU cache layer has ECC and the registers have checksums. SSDs use ECC. It's hard to say ECC has fallen out of fashion when the number of subsystems using it has increased.
DRAM's lack of commonplace ECC is a real problem. I think it draws enough attention that maybe things will start steering in the right way soon.
Even the next consumer DRAM specification (DDR5) will have an internal ECC for the memory arrays. Reliability and yields quite likely mean that even for cheap consumer grade devices it will probably become cheaper to manufacture cells with reliability but covered with redundancy at higher levels (this has been the case for NAND almost since the beginning).
For the past several decades, ECC on consumer DRAM hasn't really been required. It's cheaper and "good enough". I'm guessing software and disks (HDDs, removable media, even early SSDs) were almost certainly the biggest cause of reliability and data loss and corruption issues.
Cosmic rays and computers (1998) (nature.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25218687
1. https://www.thegamer.com/how-ionizing-particle-outer-space-h...
RowHammer is a good example - bit flips which can be triggered through specific memory access patterns.