computer Memory failure over time?

Question

Any VLSI engineers pls answer...


I have a strange suspicion that computer memory degrades over time. There are millions of transistors, each with a Poisson dist. probability of failure at any given time... obviously when one transistor goes the whole circuit does not fail. But when a ptg of transistors fail say over 3 years, does the memory actually get slower?????

I format my computer about every 1-2 years, but it always seems to be slower even running the same software. Anybody know if this is correct and how you know?

Q, your answer gave me a good laugh. RAM is solely composed of transisors (millions of them). They are built into the IC package on a microscopic level.

I know about software engineers. They are pigs and will waste all the resources they can. (Smoother fonts, dumb animated graphics, etc)

And, yes I know about Moore's Law and the theoretical doubling of memory speed at a rate of approx. seven years. Moore's law will most likely be unattainable in a couple years as it is physically impossible to make Silicon oscillate any faster than a few GHz. The atoms may be tiny, but they do have mass and Newton still applies somewhat even in a quantum world.

Balk, your answer makes sense. I deal with bit error rate and probablilties all the time in communications. However, a DSL modem has an adaptive algorithm that will slow the device down if there are too many errors rec'd. The memory cache probably has something like that too, but what you said also would make sense.

Answer 1

If you get a bit failure in the RAM chip, then you'll get a system crash or an operating system error whenever the computer tries to access the memory address that the bit belongs to. Therefore, you won't get slow-downs from bad RAM. Good RAM modules have single bit error correction (to a certain point) but even if you get the occasional bit error, your system should not noticeably slow down. (The bit errors occurs through bit transfer, so if the RAM module has bad bits, then error correction can't fix anything.)

You shouldn't have to format your computer every 1-2 years.
Software updates can make your computer slower because programs get more bloated & slow every year. These include drivers and operating system code. (You may also be picking up trojans or other malware from the Internet.)

Answer 2

Hardware does degrade but not in performance. We get used to seeing faster thing because technology speed gets higher all the time. Think of how long ago there weren't dual-processors. Now, they're gonna do quad-processors. Technology is always getting faster and doing it in a short amount of time. (I wouldn't be suprised if in 10 years, we have 10 gig quad processors -10 gig each- and a terabyte drive is a MUST.)

But we get used to seeing faster things and our older things (such as the computer you're on) gets slower. It's an optical illusion.

Hard drives degrade. In fact, you said every year or 2 that you reformat it so that's actually good. Reformatting it all the time isn't good because it degrades it even more. Think of this: How many times can you write on a piece of paper, erase it and rewrite over that same spot over and over? It eventually degrades because it is a mechanical product. Mechanical products degrade faster because it's moving.

But RAM genrally does not have transistors. Your motherboard does and if a transistor goes out, you're without a computer. RAM has micro chips on them to make them function.

Still, it's just an optical illusion unless it's your hard drive which in some cases in can be.

But generally, if anything on your computer has a transistor... whatever the transistor is on, it'll fail and doesn't matter how many of them it has on the device. A CD Rom will fail if one transistor blows out. The devices would be a lot bigger if they had backup transistors for everything.

So the next computer you get will start to seem slower over time because of this optical illusion. 56k seems VERY slow to me now that I've been on cable for 7 years.

Also things nowadays require more memory and hard drive space to run. It's going to keep increasing. I remember when games were on the real floppy disks and didn't require much. Now, games are on DVD's. The game Fable that I have is 4 DVD's. That's... a lot. And because of that, games will probably be going on HD DVD or Blu Ray in the future because of the space.

Answer 3

I think you need to take this question out of the scientific lab and understand the reality of what's going on. First, I dont understand some of the scientific stuff you mentioned, but I do understand slow-downs.

So the world of internet, games, whatever, is one where technology is always in play (IT'S DYNAMIC) such that there are increased demands on your hardware, even if it's in pristine condition. The more stuff running on your computer, plus the increasing complexity of the internet software & graphics, will "apparently" slow down your computer because it's dealing with increasing demands.

Then you pick up a little extra stuff along the way that's stored, and that tends to slow things down. And the more stuff you download and add to startup continues to drain resources.

Consider offloading some music, vids, & pics to dvd or cd, and free up some hard drive space. Look over your startup files and see if you can't eliminate some of them. Consider whether your security and anti-virus suite is hogging resources. For example, I bought an anti-spyware program that seemed to run all the time using the hard drive. I finally unloaded it and use free ones exclusively - but now my computer is much more responsive.

Hope this helps - Good Luck

Answer 4

im not an engineer, but my suggestion is to by new memory. with technology changing quickly, in one to two years, you might be looking to add more memory, so you are probly best off buying new memory......unless of course you have a motherboard that supports like 8 gigs and you actually have 8 gigs lol

Answer 5

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