sub.mesa wrote:It would cost a lot of money. Not because adding an array of capacitors bumps the bill of materials (BoM) to any significant degree.
Instead, it costs a lot of money if the much more expensive enterprise products are being replaced by cheaper consumer-level products with much lower pricetags. One could say that it is in the interest of the manufacturers to not make their consumer-level products too reliable. Otherwise, all computers would also be supplied with ECC memory which also adds only marginally to cost while vastly increasing reliability. Enterprise customers need reliable computing and are ready to pay for it. But if they pay the same price for consumer SSDs; this means a large market will get wasted.
Thus, the result is to politically separate certain features to more expensive products meant for enterprise and nearline customers, while consumers get fast but not-too-reliable products that their enterprise users will not dare to use.
However, aside from the already very dated Intel 320, the new Crucial M500 will have a special place in history, thanks to its many protections including power-safe capacitors, while being targeted as consumer product.
I can't stand big government stuff, but I would love to see a 20% "deliberately defective product" tax on non-ecc ram, set aside the funds to cover data recovery.
A lot of the blame belongs to intel too, so I'd also put this on non-ecc capable chipsets/cpus. (mem controller has moved over the years)
Volatile ram is not stable, its well proven.
The suppliers would quickly do some math and realize including 12.5% more chips would mean they could avoid the tax and still be cheaper on the market.
Other industries have had to toe the line (electrical/fire/safety codes etc, no you can't run 20A over that string) but computers have been blissfully avoiding it for too long, and everything is on a massive price spiral to the bottom anyways. There is a huge pressure in all industries to use commodity/consumer (COTS) stuff in place of actually reliable systems. FFS the latest russian probe probably died to this kind of mentality. (lets send this to space, who needs rad hardening? two of everything should cover it)
Back to the OP, regular hard drives suck too, randomly power them off and you'll get occasional data corruption. If your OS/file system don't assume this at every possible layer then you get bit rot. Enjoy!
(sadly most don't, hence things like ZFS being born)