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Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

How about the MTBF spec?

I exclusively use server or workstation/server class motherboards from Supermicro or Tyan not just for myself but also for my parents, so I can then largely ignore the hardware for 5+ years plus not worry about non-reproducible errors from radiation flipping a DRAM bit. I've done this since 1995-6 and never had one fail in the field except through an act of God (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado).

For this purpose, decreasing stress from thermal cycling is good.

(Yeah, they're grossly overpowered for what my parents do, but since I'm not including my labor in the cost they really don't cost that much.)

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I consider it borderline negligent to use anything other than ECC RAM in any machine where you care about not corrupting your data with a flipped DRAM bit.

Except it's virtually impossible to find a CPU that supports ECC.

I've used ECC in every one of my machines for the last decade or so - except for the very last once since it's was impossible to get without spending a crazy amount of money (xeon processor).

Most AMD processors support it. At least the AM3/AM3+ ones. But only ASUS seems to have support for it enabled on the motherboards.

The low end E3 Xeons (-1220, -1230) are actually rather competitively priced versus the i5 / i7. However this still requires use of a workstation / server motherboard for ECC support.

It's not virtually impossible. It may be virtually impossible in crappy cheap boards from Taiwan, but if you're buying cheap parts then you're likely not making money off the results that you're producing.

It's not the board that is the problem, it's the CPU. Only xeon CPUs have ECC support, and they are just too expensive.

They're really not: http://pcpartpicker.com/parts/cpu/#k=14&f=29&c=4&...

And as mentioned elsewhere, AMD's consumer CPUs support ECC if the motherboard enables it.

Looks like the xeon is about $50 more than the equivalent i5/7. It was worse before, when I bought my most recent motherboard.

At the moment, the second fastest Xeon E3 (of those with integrated graphics) is $15 cheaper than the equivalent i7. They're not price-competitive with the i5s (which lack HyperThreading), but the E3 processors have been very competitive with the i7s since their introduction. The only downside is they don't get put on sale the way the overclockable consumer parts do, and they aren't widely known.

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