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To: "Daniel O'Connor" <doconnor@gsoft.com.au>
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 07 Jan 2004 16:12:57 +1030."
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Date: Tue, 06 Jan 2004 22:14:44 -0800
From: Bakul Shah <bakul@BitBlocks.com>
cc: Don Lewis <truckman@freebsd.org>
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cc: yurtesen@ispro.net.tr
Subject: Re: FreeBSD Crashes with AMD 
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> ECC RAM is nice, but it is considerably more expensive (especially when you 
> consider you need to buy 'server' motherboards to use it), and it can get 
> undetectable faults too :)

This is not as bad as it used to be.  From compugeeks:
    512MB DDR PC3200 ECC : $86.50
    512MB DDR PC3200     : $65.50
For 64 bit memory ECC is as cheap as parity.

There are quite a few motherboards that 'support' ECC.  See
for example,
    http://www.anime.net/~goemon/linux-ecc/
Though, not all are built well enough.

Standard ECC is also called SECDED: Single bit Error
Correcting, Double bit Error Detecting.  All memory errors
are pretty uncommon but of those one bit errors are the most
common.

FreeBSD *needs* to have ECC since it is already such a
reliable OS -- you don't want your uptime spoiled by a memory
failure, do you?:-)