[mythtv-users] Fwd: Further Notice of Seagate Hard Drive Class Action and Proposed Settlement

Manuel McLure manuel at mclure.org
Sat Mar 13 19:35:11 UTC 2010


On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 8:43 AM, Ben Kamen <bkamen at benjammin.net> wrote:
> I understand that -- but what I'm saying is way back then was it was "so
> very important" -- it seemed to do nothing since even the most occasional
> errors would end up in a crashed machine.

I've had severe filesystem corruption happen to me because of bad
non-ECC RAM. Hundreds of files corrupted before anything crashed. I
would rather have had the machine crash immediately on detection of
bad RAM.

> Not a machine that would gracefully tell you "you have bad memory at
> location x, you should fix it".
>
> The machine would just crash --- hard.
>
> Only running memory tests would seemingly THEN find the bad RAM.

Yes, but the fact that the machine was crashing hard would give you
the idea that maybe RAM was bad. A corrupt filesystem might send you
down the path of checking the disk subsystem instead, or you might not
notice the corrupt data for months. And again - earlier crash, less
chance of corrupted filesystem data. A crash in this case is a _good_
thing.

> So in the end, it seemed like extra non-functional fluff.
>
> Even the PC Jr's (IIRC) had 9bit RAM.. and it didn't help them a bit.

It did help if you knew how to interpret the symptoms. However, I
expect that this behavior was not well documented or explained.
-- 
Manuel A. McLure WW1FA <manuel at mclure.org> <http://www.mclure.org>
...for in Ulthar, according to an ancient and significant law,
no man may kill a cat.                       -- H.P. Lovecraft


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