How do errors happen?

[BloodWithIce]

As Linus said in one of his videos: The higher the capacity, the more frequent errors will be and it will get to a point where errors will be inevitable. (speaking of ram) 
Excluding human error, what could be the cause of these errors? 

[Guest Kloaked]

Yes.

[BloodWithIce]

Yes.

Yes

[Guest Kloaked]

Yes

 

I'm glad we're on the same page.

 

[Enderman]

Yes

Yes?

[Judahnator]

Lets say for each bit on the RAM chip, there is a 0.00000001% chance that it will go bad.

 

Years ago, there may only be a few thousand bits per ram stick making the failure rate very small. However if there are trillions or more bits per chip, the chance that any one of those bits had a defect or was in any other way unable to operate gets much higher

[BloodWithIce]

Yes?

Yes!

[helping]

Yes.

Yes

Yes?

 

no.

 

also when more modules on the RAM are packed and more sticks are present, it's only logical to assume that failure is more probable. This applies to many things in life. 

[BloodWithIce]

Lets say for each bit on the RAM chip, there is a 0.00000001% chance that it will go bad.

 

Years ago, there may only be a few thousand bits per ram stick making the failure rate very small. However if there are trillions or more bits per chip, the chance that any one of those bits had a defect or was in any other way unable to operate gets much higher

Thanks.

But the failure rate is still caused by environmental factors and human error right? 

[Enderman]

Yes!

YES.

[Unhelpful]

YES.

YES!

[Enderman]

YES!

yes

[BloodWithIce]

stahp plz

[majiinpride]

##

[Akolyte]

its like saying the more components in your system theres another point of failure.  Its just because theres more memory technically theres another added chance of failure.   But unless your memory has a problem or something necessarily wrong with it, I wouldn't worry about it IMO. 

[Judahnator]

Thanks.

But the failure rate is still caused by environmental factors and human error right? 

 

To a point. In RAM there is little problem when it comes to user error (unless as the capacity grows, more start getting installed inappropriately. I doubt this much).

 

Environmental factors are a bit iffy. If your talking something like heat, then yes. Getting too hot will definitely be a problem. However most problems occur in manufacturing. Its not user error or anything, it can simply come down to a microscopic impurity in the silicon

[SlayerOfHellWyrm]

Errors can come from a multitude of things, from a sudden voltage change, to a freak cosmic ray hitting a bit storage section of your RAM. Common errors though, come from problems during transmission of data too and from RAM. Higher frequency RAM moves data in and out more frequently, inherently increasing the risk of something happening during the moving process, while higher capacity RAM, just means there's more data that could potentially be moved, that can also have an error in any of the transferred bits. That being said, there's ways of correcting errors, and that kind of RAM, ECC, is used in servers. It's expensive as hell, but when you have a 0.0000000001% chance something will go wrong during data transmission in a server, it's worth the cost to fix it.

This is just data errors, I should mention. The RAM module itself can fail for all kinds of reasons, separate from the reasons that typically cause a bit of data in RAM to swap from a 0 to a 1, ruining what it's got stored. Those errors, have so many reasons and causes, that there's no point in beginning to list. Honestly though, it's not something you should really worry about, unless you run a server (not a home server, I'm talking a rack type server requiring 100% uptime)