> Greg A. Woods wrote:
> | The question is more like:  Why would you ever *not* want ECC?????

Not all of the required operations to do ECC are in parallel with
other operations.  Turning on ECC on the Intel chipsets, for example,
will slow things down a bit.

The question is, is the warm fuzzy worth it to you?

My old Sparc-SLC boat anchor had parity, so I could watch the
occasional errors.  In 2 years of almost continuous on time I never
got a single parity error.  Then I got a Kingston expansion kit and it
would get one parity error every month or so.  Replacing the offending
SIMM fixed things again such that I never had parity errors again even
with the expanded memory.

So the question do you want ECC really boils down in my mind to do you
want to run with an added tick delay always or do you want the once in
a very long time parity error to log the event and do a "shutdown -r +10".

For memory thats as good as the SIMM's I had on the SLC, I'd say its a
hands down win to just do penalty-less detection (if available), and
perhaps just "wing it" without ECC after watching the ECC logs for a
month or so.

-wolfgang