FWIW I’m a believer in ECC. But give it some time. Maybe you’ll see errors. Or maybe you’ll get lucky and see none. Either way, you’re covered!
Google's results show that the error rate is strongly driven by bad modules rather than random errors. A module that throws one error is up to 224x more likely to throw another error, and corrected errors are a strong predictor of future uncorrectable errors.
The major exception is cosmic rays, which can flip bits even in a good module. But unless you're at high altitude they don't really dominate the error rate.
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/%7Ebianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf
Obviously without ECC you don't know if you have bad modules, but, if a machine passes a memtest scrub for 24+ hours then it's probably fine.
On-die ECC should also catch the majority of these errors, especially if you are not right at the limits of your memory training. JEDEC type timings should be very forgiving to transmission errors in general.
People are very down on the "on-die ECC" on DDR5, they act like ECC is completely useless unless you protect the whole datapath, and of course it would be preferable to do so. But actually the on-die ECC should catch a large number of the errors, because bad modules (dies) are where the errors mostly happen.
Not sure why, maybe it's the different memory access patterns, maybe bad dimms are more sensitive to repeated accesses below the rowhammer level, that healthy dimms have no problems with.
I find things like make -j for large builds MUCH better at finding memory errors than memtest.
I was just hoping to see some errors on a regular basis, so I could feel vindicated and rave to everyone about how useful ECC is and point to my console and say "look at how many errors you might be missing!". ;)
(I choose not to worry about flips of three bits or more. YMMV.)
This is dependent on the system configuration. For Linux, default behavior is to halt only if the uncorrected error occurs in memory used by the kernel.
It's more accurate to say that double bit flips will be detected.
Search for "edac_mc_panic_on_ue"