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...