Andrew Brereton's Lifestream

DRAM study turns assumptions about errors upside down

October 8 2009, 12:11pm

The conventional wisdom on DRAM error rates is that errors are rare, and the majority of the errors that do occur are so-called "soft errors"—randomly corrupted bits that have been flipped by incoming cosmic rays. But a recent, large-scale study of DRAM errors released by Google turns this wisdom on its head, and in doing so reinforces the importance of error correction coding (ECC) and regular hardware replacement for datacenter machines.