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by hpfr 1820 days ago
Does rebooting help with soft errors in non-ECC RAM? I would have thought bit flips would be transient in nature, but I'm not really familiar.
2 comments

Running ZFS (FreeNAS/TrueNAS) on 2 home made NAS devices for years and years, I can say it is rock solid without ever using ECC RAM due to lack of choices. I can bet there were many soft-errors in all these years, but so far I never had problems that could not be recovered; the biggest issue ever was destroying the boot USB storage in months, but that was partially solved lately, I moved to fixed drives as boot drive and later I moved to virtualization for boot disk and OS, so the problem completely went away.
occasionally a bit flip will corrupt the state of something important and long running, a reboot will obviously clear this

usually it will hit nothing and have no side effects