From: Joe Greco [mailto:jgreco@ns.sol.net]
I'd have to say that that's been the experience here as well, ECC is great, yes, but it just doesn't seem to be something that is "absolutely vital" on an ongoing basis, as some of the other posters here have implied, to correct the constant bit errors that are(n't) showing up.
Maybe I'll get bored one of these days and find some devtools to stick on one of the Macs.
In all the years I've been playing with high end hardware, the best sample machine I have is an SGI Origin 200 that I had in production for over ten years, with the only downtime during that time being once to add more memory, once to replace a failed drive, once to move the rack and the occasional OS upgrade (I tended to skip a 6.5.x release or two between updates, and after 6.5.30 there were of course no more). That machine was down less than 24 hours cumulative for that entire period. In that ten year span, I saw TWO ECC parity errors (both single bit correctable). On any machine that saw regular ECC errors it was a sign of failing hardware (usually, but not necessarily the memory, there are other parts in there that have to carry that data too). As much as I prefer ECC, it's not a show stopper for me if it's not there. Jamie