bkil vs. programming

I had this post in draft for a long time now, however it is evergreen. Just consider the recent exploits  focused on RAM leakage. Although, do note that ECC by itself can't give 100% protection against row hammer, so it is only loosely related. An excellent empirical work has been published in 2009 regarding DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large Scale Field Study . " About a third of machines and over 8% of DIMMs in our fleet saw at least one correctable error per year. " - analysis by  James Hamilton " Besides error rates much higher than expected - which is plenty bad - the study found that error rates were motherboard, not DIMM type or vendor, dependent. This means that some popular mobos have poor EMI hygiene. " - analysis by ZDnet Note that such an event plainly translates to faults on non-ECC machines. So despite the fact that human error is much more probable, it is not unlikely at all that you encounter bit errors in everyday life. Consider the foll...

Some years ago, I've found a few bad sectors on my WD10EARS Caviar Green drive not too long after purchasing, but I decided to simply partition around it. Actually, I can't remember now when that was, but I've either used up a major part of the disk and had nowhere to back up everything by then, or I've deliberately planned to extend the warranty by a replacement... The original purchase came standard with 3 years of warranty. The drive didn't store too precious data in general, but no attention was given to the issue for years. The fault seemed to propagate by a few dozen bad sectors over the allocated 1GB margin, injecting a few macroblock errors to 5 of my unimportant home recordings. Actually this spreading was really slow, as occasional slowdowns were indeed experienced when randomly accessing some of the files in the past, but the fix was never a priority. For serious use, I'd like to point out the importance of data scrubbing for protecting against b...