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Memory scrubbing consists of reading from each computer memory location, correcting bit errors with an error-correcting code , and writing the corrected data back to the same location.
Due to the high integration density of modern computer memory chips, the individual memory cell structures became small enough to be vulnerable to cosmic rays and/or alpha particle emission. The errors caused by these phenomena are called soft errors. Over 8% of DIMM modules experience at least one correctable error per year. This can be a problem for DRAM and SRAM based memories. The probability of a soft error at any individual memory bit is very small. However, together with the large amount of memory modern computers—especially servers—are equipped with, and together with extended periods of uptime, the probability of soft errors in the total memory installed is significant.
The information in an ECC memory is stored redundantly enough to correct single bit error per memory word. Hence, an ECC memory can support the scrubbing of the memory content. Namely, if the memory controller scans systematically through the memory, the single bit errors can be detected, the erroneous bit can be determined using the ECC checksum, and the corrected data can be written back to the memory.