alt Hacker NewsThis is the attitude that needs to change. If RAM is 25% of the system cost (say for a home server in your example), then the cost for ECC is 3% of the system cost. There is no world where accepting data corruption in order to save 3% cost is a reasonable tradeoff. ECC should be standard, period.
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Let me kmow where I can get ECC RAM that's only 12% more than the price of non-ECC and I'll strongly consider it the next time I do a build. (Otoh, prices are high, so I'm not building anything for a while unless stuff breaks)
> There is no world where accepting data corruption in order to save 3% cost is a reasonable tradeoff.
It is if you're doing something where corruption is detectable after the fact, and happens rarely enough that redoing affected work adds less than 3% overhead.
When I last looked at this (a couple of years ago), it wasn't just the cost difference—the ECC memory available to purchase was also slower than non-ECC offerings, or at least cost significantly more if I actually wanted the same speed. At least for me, going ECC simply didn't make sense.
Caveat that I was building a gaming PC at that time, I might have gone differently for a home server. And, this was before the memory market went nuts for unrelated reasons.