> Are you sure?  I was under the impression that it required one or two
> extra bits.  But, I'm no expert on the subject...  I just know ECC
> SIMMs are a lot more expensive than "normal" SIMMs.

ECC bits required scale as lg2(wordsize protected); for 64
bits you need 8 extra; ditto for byte parity.  Note, though, that 
if you are ECCing 64-bit words there are two practical problems:

1)  32-bit writes require r/m/w cycles, which slows things down a lot.

2)  It is not completely clear that ability to correct any single-bit
error (in a 64-bit word) and detect any two-bit error give a longer
MTBF when compared to per-byte parity.  Consider: any error that 
would be corrected by ECC would be detected by parity.  Since the
described situation was undetected errors, and multi-bit errors tend
to come in multiples greater than 2 (they're usually due to connector faults
or broken multi-bit silicon; common widths are x1 and x4), it is not
even clear that ECC would have helped in this situation.  Admittedly,
a carefully designed ECC system can still catch the "common" failure
cases.

--Terry Moore
tmm@mcci.com