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
Statistics are your friend here.
In 1996 IBM estimated 1 soft error per month per 256 MB of RAM. If you’ve got 8 GB of RAM that means you should expect a single soft error per 22.5 hours of run time. Most of your RAM isn’t doing anything important most of the time, if you assume that 70% is used for precaching data that’ll get thrown out then you’re down to a single soft error in a section that matters every 67.5 hours. Now what are the chances that even in that sector that matters that you’ll get that error and read from it before it gets overwritten again?
The end result of all this is that while you may get 1 soft error per day, it is extremely unlikely to impact a critical section of RAM mostly because most things in RAM aren’t critical to the OS operation. You’d have to time and target your bit flip extremely well to cause the OS to crash due to cosmic rays
Now that isn’t to say it doesn’t happen. I guarantee someone in the world had an unexpected crash of some system due to a bitflip from cosmic rays, but the chances of it happening to your system while you’re using it are quite low
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