How frequently would you say you encounter a crash that you can pin down to a lack of ECC memory in your laptop or desktop?
I have a Ryzen desktop with ECC, and it registers about one bit-flip per week. I don't know how many of those would become crashes, but I'm more worried about the ones that wouldn't.
This isn’t normal. You have a bad memory module.
A non-ECC machine should able to support memtest86 (a rigorous memory testing tool) for a week straight without a single bitflip.
Having a bit flip per week is so far away from normal that it’s definitely a bad memory part.
Memtest86 is not magic. It is designed to look for systematic failures, even if intermittent. It does that pretty well given it has only bus-level access.
Maybe OP's house is in the Van Allen Belt or something?
> This isn’t normal. You have a bad memory module.
> Having a bit flip per week is so far away from normal that it’s definitely a bad memory part.
It's hard to know what's normal. If you're somewhere in the world like northern Sweden the chance of cosmic rays goes up from being less protected from the suns rays (Hey, but northern lights!) and if you're at higher altitude; along with less interesting things such as how shielded the ram is (server chassis, if you removed the rack doors or not).
Memory density has a lot to go with it too, the chances of bitflips increases a lot.
Anyway; regardless of the theory behind it: I've run global operations with multiple-thousands of physical machines with high density ram (and 16-32 DIMMS in each server) and noticed at least 1 bit flip a week on average for each machine. But some locations were worse impacted than others.
Annoyingly, ECC is not created equal, there are some correctable bit-flips that are hidden from the iDRAC/iLO: this is the same type of ECC that the rPI is using (referred to as on-die): https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rpi4/raspberry-pi-4-produ...
As with all things like this YMMV, but ECC is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
yeah, you have bad ram. Or you overclocked it.
I have a Ryzen server with 32GB ECC RAM running 24/7 for a year. 0 bit flips. Not a single one.
Of course, overclocked or not, I don't get memory errors. Just the occasional EDAC event.