Reasons For Not Using ECC
In most computers used for serious scientific or financial computing and as servers, ECC is the rule rather than the exception, as can be seen by examining manufacturers' specifications.
However most motherboards intended for desktop (rather than server) machines cannot use ECC, and those that can are shipped with it disabled (but easily enabled, usually by a change to BIOS setup), to allow use of cheaper non-ECC memory.
ECC memory is higher cost, as each bank is 9 memory chips compared to 8 for non-ECC memory, and the lack of demand for ECC RAM allows for less economy-of-scale advantage.. In some cases the price ratio reduces to 9/8, as an example, on 2008/11/30, on Crucial.com, an ECC CL=5 unbuffered 2GB DDR2-667 DIMM cost $30 while the corresponding non-ECC part cost $28, a difference of 1/15, however some ECC modules cost twice as much as their non-ECC equivalents ). ECC-supporting motherboards, chipsets, and processors may also be more expensive, since they are priced for non-consumer markets. Furthermore, ECC RAM has a performance impact of around 2–3 percent, depending on application, due to the additional time needed for ECC memory controllers to perform error checking.
Read more about this topic: ECC Memory
Famous quotes containing the words reasons for and/or reasons:
“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences.... It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff; you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)