Sometimes, ECC memory maintains a memory system immune to single-bit errors: the data that is read from every phrase is at all times the identical as the info that had been written to it, even if one of the bits truly saved has been flipped to the mistaken state. Most non-ECC memory can't detect errors, although some non-ECC memory with parity help permits detection however not correction. ECC memory is utilized in most computers where knowledge corruption can't be tolerated, like industrial management purposes, important databases, and infrastructural memory caches. Error correction codes protect towards undetected information corruption and are utilized in computer systems the place such corruption is unacceptable, examples being scientific and monetary computing applications, or in database and file servers. ECC may also scale back the variety of crashes in multi-person server purposes and most-availability programs. Electrical or magnetic interference inside a pc system may cause a single little bit of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) to spontaneously flip to the alternative state.

It was initially thought that this was mainly due to alpha particles emitted by contaminants in chip packaging material, however analysis has shown that almost all of 1-off gentle errors in DRAM chips occur as a result of background radiation, mainly neutrons from cosmic ray secondaries, which may change the contents of a number of memory cells or interfere with the circuitry used to read or write to them. Hence, the error charges enhance quickly with rising altitude