But how much bit rot? You’ll never know.

If I don't know about it, then how does it affect me / why should I care? My home server does what it is supposed to do and has done so for a decade. If bit rot /bit flips in memory does not affect my day-to-day life I much prefer cheaper hardware.

I do hope the nuclear powerplant next door uses more fault tolerant hardware, though.

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loeg 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Eventually you might notice the pictures or other documents you were saving on your home server have artifacts, or no longer open. This is undesireable for most people using computer storage.

> I much prefer cheaper hardware.

The cost savings are modest; order of magnitude 12% for the DIMMs, and less elsewhere. Computers are already extremely cheap commodities.

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zadikian 7 hours ago | parent [-]

12% for the DIMMs only, but with Intel you need Xeon and its accompanying motherboard for it. Someone said AMD "kinda" lets you do ECC on consumer hardware, not sure what the caveats are besides just being unbuffered.

Assuming that's more due to intentional market segmentation than actual cost, yeah I would pay 12% more for ECC. But I'm with the other guy on not valuing it a ton. I have backups which are needed regardless of bitrot, and even if those don't help, losing a photo isn't a huge deal for me.

	▲	loeg 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Someone said AMD "kinda" lets you do ECC on consumer hardware, not sure what the caveats are besides just being unbuffered. That was me. It isn't "officially" supported by AMD, but it should work. You can enable EDAC monitoring in Linux and observe detected correction events happening. > Assuming that's more due to intentional market segmentation than actual cost That's the argument, yeah.

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zadikian 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm more concerned how the Mac filesystems don't have payload checksums.