Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!peregrine!elroy!spl1!laidbak!att!rutgers!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!k.gp.cs.cmu.edu!dpm
From: dpm@k.gp.cs.cmu.edu (David Maynard)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT Memory - No Parity
Message-ID: <8616@spl1.UUCP>
Date: 3 Nov 88 17:38:25 GMT
Sender: news@spl1.UUCP
Reply-To: dpm@k.gp.cs.cmu.edu (David Maynard)
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 27
Keywords:


Personally, I am sure a lot more comfortable using a machine with parity
checking!  At this instant, I am using a Sun-3 that has a flaky memory chip.
Every few days, I get a parity error that brings the system to a crashing
halt.  However, I would rather have that happen than have it randomly
corrupt my files and/or the system files.  Without the parity, there is a
very low chance that I would notice these errors in a timely fashion.

I had some really BAD experiences using a Sun system with a flaky disk
controller that was randomly tweaking bits.  We had the system running for
almost a week before we realized that really bad things were happening.  By
the time the system fell down around itself, we had lost about a week's
worth of work. We couldn't really trust any of the files that had been
created during that time.  I could imagine a bad memory chip causing similar
things to happen.

-David

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 David P. Maynard (dpm@cs.cmu.edu)
 Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
 Carnegie Mellon University
 Pittsburgh, PA  15213
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 Any opinions expressed are mine only.  I haven't asked the ECE department
 or CMU what they think.
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