[CentOS] server specifications

Nico Kadel-Garcia nkadel at gmail.com
Mon Feb 14 04:59:26 UTC 2011


On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 10:23 PM, David Brian Chait <dchait at invenda.com> wrote:
> By doubling the hardware, you still do not overcome the potential corruption that could occur with non-ecc memory. If this is truly a mission critical application then it really does not serve much of a purpose to short change yourself with substandard hardware.

First, please don't top post in this group.

Second, you've got a historically valid point about ECC's advantages.
But the accumulated costs of the higher end motherboard, memory,
shortage of space for upgrades in the same unit, the downtime at the
BIOS to reset the "disabled by default" ECC settings in the BIOS, and
the system monitoring to detect and manage such errors add up *really
fast* in a moderate sized shop.

Worse, I've seen some serious false economies with memory. People with
tight budgets getting third party memory to install themselves, then
losing all their "savings" in downtime because they had trouble
telling the difference between "hard enough to seat the RAM" and "hard
enough to crack the motherboard, cut your hand, and bleed all over
important junctions".

Pleae, name a single instance in the last 10 years where ECC
demonstrably saved you work, especially if you made sure ti burn in
the ssytem components on servers upon their first bootup...



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