Re: ECC RAM really needed?

On Fri, May 25, 2007 at 18:45:15 -0700,
  Craig James <craig_james@emolecules.com> wrote:
> We're thinking of building some new servers.  We bought some a while back 
> that have ECC (error correcting) RAM, which is absurdly expensive compared 
> to the same amount of non-ECC RAM.  Does anyone have any real-life data 
> about the error rate of non-ECC RAM, and whether it matters or not?  In my 
> long career, I've never once had a computer that corrupted memory, or at 
> least I never knew if it did.  ECC sound like a good idea, but is it 
> solving a non-problem?

In the past when I purchased ECC ram it wasn't that much more expensive
than nonECC ram.

Wikipedia suggests a rule of thumb of one error per month per gigabyte,
though suggests error rates vary widely. They reference a paper that should
provide you with more background.