How frequent are DRAM errors?

Question

How frequent are DRAM errors? How significant a factor is heat? Is it worth investing in ECC RAM?

possible duplicate of [Should I use ECC RAM for the next computer I build?](http://superuser.com/questions/4048/should-i-use-ecc-ram-for-the-next-computer-i-build) — Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007, Dec 11 '11 at 07:48
@techie007: I don't see how those two are a duplicate. Advice and frequency differ... — Tamara Wijsman, Dec 11 '11 at 08:09
Only if your motherboard supports it. Mostly you want this for high useage servers and the boards will be designated for it. — Fiasco Labs, Nov 20 '13 at 18:06
Yes, it is worth investing in ECC, esp for critical applications, e.g. medical, space, financial. Nowadays, even GPUs have ECC. Occurrence of soft-errors has been increasing due to several reasons, e.g. process scaling, etc. See my [survey paper](https://goo.gl/2dtMtM) for reference. Also see this related [superuser question](http://superuser.com/questions/4048/is-there-a-certain-or-measurable-advantage-to-using-ecc-ram-in-a-desktop-pc). — user984260, Dec 20 '15 at 16:32

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 27 '09 at 21:35

A paper addressing this issue was published here.

"The goal of this paper is to answer questions such as the following: How common are memory errors in practice? What are their statistical properties? How are they affected by external factors, such as temperature and utilization, and by chip-specific factors, such as chip density, memory technology and DIMM age?"

And this is a part from summaries:

"This either indicates that chip size does not play a dominant role in influencing CEs or >there are other, stronger confounders in our data that we did not control for." >Similarly, "In all cases, for the same utilization levels the error rates for high versus >low temperature are very similar."

I would still recommend ECC for production systems, mind you.

Added some other points brought up by chris in my original answer and just made it all one. — Troggy, Aug 27 '09 at 21:37
You seem to have self-answered. But I don't see a frequency in your answer, are there any numbers? — Tamara Wijsman, Dec 11 '11 at 08:10

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 20 '13 at 17:41

According to a study done by Google, memory errors are fairly common, affecting about 8% of DIMMS per year:

[Google study]

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf

[ZDNet interpretation/summary]

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/dram-error-rates-nightmare-on-dimm-street/638

How frequent are DRAM errors?

2 Answers2

Linked