ECC vs NON ECC memory upgrades

[Dave2002]

I ran the Crucial Scanner over two of my iMacs recently, to see if it might be worth upgrading the memory. The upgrades are relatively affordable, but I notice that Crucial's suggested memory is NON ECC (i.e not error correcting memory). Does this really matter? Isn't the Apple installed memory the ECC kind? I did an upgrade once before and I as quite pleased with it, but surely ECC memory should be more resilient, or am I wrong?

Comments?

[Anastasius]

I recently upgraded the memory in my wife's iMac and an old MacBook. Both times I simply ran the Crucial checker, opted for the largest memory I could fit in and added it to the basket! I didn't even bother to look at the spec.

They both work fine.

[Dave2002]

I recently upgraded the memory in my wife's iMac and an old MacBook. Both times I simply ran the Crucial checker, opted for the largest memory I could fit in and added it to the basket! I didn't even bother to look at the spec.

They both work fine.

I agree that the memory from Crucial might work fine. I installed memory from Crucial into another machine a couple of years ago - and after a bit of fiddling around it all worked. My question was really about whether ECC would be better. I think the Apple original memory might be ECC - which apparently should make it more resilient/reliable for critical applications, though without proper software support it wouldn't be much use. Also, there's not much point without at least a triple processor system.

[johnb]

Surely the best thing is to refer to the original memory specification for the computer and follow that. Or is there something I'm missing?

PS. This might be helpful: http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Crucial-...ix/ta-p/150486