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From: BILLW@SRI-KL.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: Is parity *really* worth it?
Message-ID: <702@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 3-Aug-84 18:33:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.702
Posted: Fri Aug  3 18:33:00 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 6-Aug-84 00:48:48 EDT
Lines: 16

Although parity increases your confidence that data in memory is
valid, it isnt clear to me (from a software point of veiw) that
this necessarrilly does the user any good.  In a critical application,
it could be a very bad thing for a word of memory to suddenly go
bad, but it could be worse for the system to crash with a "parity
error" message, and lose ALL your data.  Most software is not
equiped to handle parity errors in any reasonable manner.

Parity errors are pretty rare anyway.  How many people have
actually sen a parity error on their IBMPCs?

I get the impression that with the fancy ECC chips on the market
these days, it is easier to implement ECC than parity (although
more expensive, of course).  Is this impression correct?

BillW