Dealing with HW faults

Do we need to protect from a hardware fault?

To answer this question, we need to consider the implication of the fault on the system performance. Consider the two options:

If the fault might affect the performance significantly, we should consider preventing the fault or protecting from the fault.
If the fault might not affect the performance significantly, we should consider omitting the component from the design: probably, it is redundant.

Typically, the second option suggest that the system design is unnecessarily complex, and that we should apply the principle of parsimony