With cosmic ray soft errors occurring quite often, how comes my non-ECC RAM/SSD doesn’t lead to blue screens at all?

Question

With cosmic ray soft errors occurring quite often, how comes my non-ECC RAM/SSD doesn’t lead to blue screens at all?

In: Technology

Answer 1

a) the error rate is low, perhaps one error bit per month per 256 Megabytes of ram

b) not all errors are bad. If you have an error in code that doesn’t get executed or stack space that’s not in use (so it’s written again before it’s read) – no harm no foul.

c) even bad errors don’t need to cause BSOD. Turn an “a” to a “c” on some help screen, even if the user sees it it’s a typo, not a processing fault. Similarly, even changing an executable instruction (from an ADD to a SUB) might give the wrong answer but not cause the program to die.

d) Even if an error occurs, the OS tries hard to clean up or terminate the bad process without crashing the whole OS. The OS code is a smaller part of memory than it once was, as memory gets bigger.

BTW, I doubt you have non-ECC SSD, that sort of thing is pretty standard in SSD controllers.