whats memory parity ?

[Eddie N]

friends ,

im going to be building a computer set up just for audio recording and i hit a snag in the memory department... can anyone explain to me what parity is when talking about memory ? whats the difference between memory with parity and memory w/o it ?

thanks

eddie

 

[Dragon]

Parity RAM allows memory errors to be detected before they cause problems without you knowing about them. While we're on the subject, ECC refers to error-correcting RAM which can detect and correct its own errors. This is lots more expensive.

While RAM errors are not extremely common, they're statistically more likely now that people have insanely huge amounts of memory in their computers (512 MB is not unheard of).

I believe only the older 30 and 72-pin RAM boards have choices of parity and non-parity and that all modern 168-pin RAM is parity, but I could be wrong.