dpm@k.gp.cs.cmu.edu (David Maynard) (11/04/88)
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 --- David P. Maynard (dpm@cs.cmu.edu) Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 --- Any opinions expressed are mine only. I haven't asked the ECE department or CMU what they think. ---