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Date:      Mon, 20 May 1996 10:15:18 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
To:        richard@pegasus.com (Richard Foulk)
Cc:        rgrimes@GndRsh.aac.dev.com, jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com, hackers@freebsd.org, hardware@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Triton chipset with 256k cache caches 32M only?
Message-ID:  <199605201515.KAA19424@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
In-Reply-To: <199605170151.PAA20303@pegasus.com> from "Richard Foulk" at May 16, 96 03:51:28 pm

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> } Only if you have memory that is failing or you need extreamly reliable
> } operation (good memory should have a single bit error rate of something
> } like 1 in 10 years).
> 
> This is all subject to personal judgement.
> 
> How a 15% performance hit compares with the possibility of lost or bad
> data should not be trivialized.  One error in ten years may not seem
> like much, but it could still cost lots of time and money.  And it's
> just as likely to happen today as in ten years.

Agreed, however, it's much more likely that some other component (think:
disks, cpu fans, etc) will exhibit errors.  15% is a fairly hefty price to
pay for a relatively small return.

On a well built RAID system that needs the extra reliability, perhaps it is
warranted.  It is probably _not_ warranted on your average run of the mill
server class system to lose 15% just to gain one correction every ten years
rather than one crash every ten years, unless you have purposely over-spec'd
the machine to account for the 15% loss.

Obviously it is a matter of how paranoid (or silly?) you want to be..  I am
perfectly confident that my disks will puke before my RAM.

... Joe

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Greco - Systems Administrator			      jgreco@ns.sol.net
Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI			   414/546-7968



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