How come bit flips aren't destroying my computer?
Hire the world's top talent on demand or became one of them at Toptal: https://topt.al/25cXVn
and get $2,000 discount on your first invoice
--------------------------------------------------
Take control of your privacy with Proton's trusted, Swiss-based, secure services.
Choose what you need and safeguard your digital life:
Mail: https://go.getproton.me/SH1CU
VPN: https://go.getproton.me/SH1DI
Password Manager: https://go.getproton.me/SH1DJ
Drive: https://go.getproton.me/SH1CT
Music by Eric Matyas
https://www.soundimage.org
Track title: Lost Meadow
--
Chapters
00:00 How Come Bit Flips Aren'T Destroying My Computer?
00:53 Accepted Answer Score 4
01:52 Thank you
--
Full question
https://superuser.com/questions/1410635/...
--
Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...
--
Tags
#memory #ecc
#avk47
ACCEPTED ANSWER
Score 4
The odds of CR-caused bit flips are discussed in the above SE thread, and as mentioned in this YCombinator thread linked in the comments above, the largest volume of data sensitive to bit flip (in memory) is media which won't have problems with this
In worst cases for the average person, the bit flip will result in an error which the system will catch and attempt to recover from. Now you have something else to blame BSODs on.
Besides hardening (like the hardware designs in spacefaring systems) and error correction (like the resilient architectures of SPARC CPUs or ECC memory), most current improvements appear to make consumer hardware MORE vulnerable to cosmic-ray-caused bit flip.
Because of this I think we can surmise that the primary reason your personal computer isn't riddled with errors is improved software design which is more resilient to small issues in the data.
That said, the primary lesson to take from this is that you have one more reason you should be backing your data up.