How common is data corruption with non ecc ram

[Pc6777]

How common is data corruption in ram on not ecc ram? None of my motherboards support it so I coudnt even if even if I wanted to unless I spent a lot of money on getting a new computer. I did some large archival projects and large(many terabytes) data transfers between large drives a few months back,  wondering if there's a chance I could have experienced "silent" corruption". And when ram has errors is it ussuly beacause the stick is on its way out? And would I have noticed a dying stick beacause it's been months since this project took place?

[F1N]

I believe there was an article what did some tests about this a few year back, should be: https://blog.codinghorror.com/to-ecc-or-not-to-ecc/

[da na]

Not too common. Unless you like to leave your PC on for weeks at a time it should be fine

[SorryBella]

4 minutes ago, Pc6777 said:

How common is data corruption in ram on not ecc ram?

Heavily depends on EVERYTHING. Your PSU and power line quality, your app and OS, the speed you run it and how tight its timing is, and how many 4 leaf clover you have stashed in your wardrobe. Rule of thumb is for you to get ECC RAM when you can afford it and you cant afford to have what you got crashed spectacularly at any time.

 

8 minutes ago, Pc6777 said:

And when ram has errors is it ussuly beacause the stick is on its way out? And would I have noticed a dying stick beacause it's been months since this project took place?

Not nessesarily. If you have RAM related crashes repeatedly though? Thats a red flag.

[Pc6777]

2 minutes ago, SorryClaire said:

Heavily depends on EVERYTHING. Your PSU and power line quality, your app and OS, the speed you run it and how tight its timing is, and how many 4 leaf clover you have stashed in your wardrobe. Rule of thumb is for you to get ECC RAM when you can afford it and you cant afford to have what you got crashed spectacularly at any time.

 

Not nessesarily. If you have RAM related crashes repeatedly though? Thats a red flag.

No problems with my PCs, just paranoid. I use decent psus in all my systems (tier b on the tier list), no crashes or anything, would an error cause a crash or just silent corruption?

[Pc6777]

5 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Not too common. Unless you like to leave your PC on for weeks at a time it should be fine

Does leaving it on for weeks at a time increase the chance of errors for any piticular reason? And could having a PC on the carpet have any effect? 

[da na]

Just now, Pc6777 said:

Does leaving it on for weeks at a time increase the chance of errors for any piticular reason? And could having a PC on the carpet have any effect? 

Well the longer it is on the more chances there are for things going wrong. I’ve left non ecc systems on for months but those didn’t have a GUI, that sort of thing. And carpet has no effect. Memory corruption occurs because of software not hardware 

[Pc6777]

Just now, Mel0nMan said:

Well the longer it is on the more chances there are for things going wrong. I’ve left non ecc systems on for months but those didn’t have a GUI, that sort of thing. And carpet has no effect. Memory corruption occurs because of software not hardware 

I had multiple PCs running for long periods of time during my archival project, it was pretty massive in scale I had 3 PCs set up for different tasks and was burning blue rays and doing uncompression tasks and encoding vidioe with handbrake too, it was a bit of a mess as I was newer to all this stuff when I started the project.

[Kilrah]

4 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Memory corruption occurs because of software not hardware 

That's very wrong, at least in the case of the current discussion - ECC is there to detect/prevent hardware-related issues, it does nothing regarding software.

 

Time you leave it on doesn't matter regarding hardware-related corruption ECC could prevent against.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset

[YoungBlade]

5 minutes ago, Pc6777 said:

Does leaving it on for weeks at a time increase the chance of errors for any piticular reason?

The odds of an error cropping up in RAM is quite low. It can happen in unused parts of RAM or in transient data that's about to be written over anyway, which makes the impacts of these errors even more minor. However, when left on for a long time, the errors can begin to stack. The first error might not cause much issue, maybe the second won't either, nor the third, fourth, fifth, etc. But eventually, if enough errors occur and aren't corrected, something will go wrong. A reboot that totally clears the RAM will correct all the errors by its nature.

 

Note: even over weeks, this is very unlikely. My family used to leave our computer on all the time (HDD boot-up times...) and yet the computer rarely ever had weird, inexplicable errors you could even consider attributing to RAM errors.

 

ECC is for assurance in mission-critical applications that must not fail and will be running for months or even years without a reboot.

[Pc6777]

1 minute ago, YoungBlade said:

The odds of an error cropping up in RAM is quite low. It can happen in unused parts of RAM or in transient data that's about to be written over anyway, which makes the impacts of these errors even more minor. However, when left on for a long time, the errors can begin to stack. The first error might not cause much issue, maybe the second won't either, nor the third, fourth, fifth, etc. But eventually, if enough errors occur and aren't corrected, something will go wrong. A reboot that totally clears the RAM will correct all the errors by its nature.

 

Note: even over weeks, this is very unlikely. My family used to leave our computer on all the time (HDD boot-up times...) and yet the computer rarely ever had weird, inexplicable errors you could even consider attributing to RAM errors.

 

ECC is for assurance in mission-critical applications that must not fail and will be running for months or even years without a reboot.

So the chance of errors is low, and the chance the error will cause data corruption is even lower? That's good news I guess, but a company with 100s of servers and decades of operation I guess you are bound to have an error at some point. Even one but could hurt important data or make something unusable tho.

[Kilrah]

Nothing's perfect. 

If something is REALLY REALLY critical then you make all the systems redundant and cross-checking, at great expense.

[YoungBlade]

3 minutes ago, Pc6777 said:

So the chance of errors is low, and the chance the error will cause data corruption is even lower? That's good news I guess, but a company with 100s of servers and decades of operation I guess you are bound to have an error at some point. Even one but could hurt important data or make something unusable tho.

Precisely. Unlikely things happen given enough chances. A hole in one is an unlikely event, but over the course of years, with thousands of golfers and hundreds of thousands of games, a golf course will probably record many even if you, personally, never got one.

[Pc6777]

33 minutes ago, SorryClaire said:

Heavily depends on EVERYTHING. Your PSU and power line quality, your app and OS, the speed you run it and how tight its timing is, and how many 4 leaf clover you have stashed in your wardrobe. Rule of thumb is for you to get ECC RAM when you can afford it and you cant afford to have what you got crashed spectacularly at any time.

 

Not nessesarily. If you have RAM related crashes repeatedly though? Thats a red flag.

Does faster ram/Tigger timings increase the chance of corruption/problems? I use slower ram, the fastest stuff I have is this gskill stuff that xmps up to 3000 not sure about the timings.

[Pc6777]

28 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Nothing's perfect. 

If something is REALLY REALLY critical then you make all the systems redundant and cross-checking, at great expense.

How low is the chance tho? Like 0.1 percent I experienced ram related silent corruption that ecc would have prevented? How rare is it exactly? I don't want to buy new computers so it's too late for that, I'm stuck with what I got at this point. 

[Mister Woof]

The vast majority of consumer level hardware hasn't been ECC for as long as I can remember.

 

I would say that if you have to ask if you need ECC RAM, then you don't need ECC RAM.

[Pc6777]

2 hours ago, Mister Woof said:

The vast majority of consumer level hardware hasn't been ECC for as long as I can remember.

 

I would say that if you have to ask if you need ECC RAM, then you don't need ECC RAM.

How rare are errors that ecc corrects? I did some large archival projects with normal ddr4, and I can't get ecc even if I wanted to without buying new PCs which I won't do. I'm just curious, and a bit paranoid that I had all my data going through normal ram.

[Mister Woof]

2 hours ago, Pc6777 said:

How rare are errors that ecc corrects? I did some large archival projects with normal ddr4, and I can't get ecc even if I wanted to without buying new PCs which I won't do. I'm just curious, and a bit paranoid that I had all my data going through normal ram.

Someone else posted a link with some information. That's probably more accurate than whatever I have to say.

 

I've never used it, never needed it.

 

Largely corporate America on the user end doesn't use it, either.