Memory failures - stop blaming cosmic rays!

Here's a fascinating (really) article from IEEE on an investigation into DRAM failures. 

Most computer problems are due to these memory failures. Surprisingly, until now, no one really knew much about them. The prevalent assumption was that memory corruption was due to high-energy particle cascades from cosmic rays… (really!)

Since DRAM error events are relatively rare, it takes analysis of huge datacenters with thousands of computers storing petabytes of data to come to meaningful conclusions. 

It's a quick read and very interesting if you like to know what makes computers tick (or, rather, what makes them stop ticking…)

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/drams-damning-defects-and-how-they-cripple-computers?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IeeeSpectrum+%28IEEE+Spectrum%29