Inquiry about ECC RAM Requirement for unRAID in Home Lab NAS System

[Himala]

Hello unRAID Pre-sales Support Team,

I hope this message finds you well. I am in the planning stages of building a home lab NAS system and am considering using unRAID as my OS of choice. My planned configuration includes an Intel i7 CPU, 64GB of non-ECC RAM, and approximately 6 disks.

I wanted to inquire about the necessity of ECC RAM when using unRAID. Is ECC RAM a requirement for ensuring redundancy and data integrity with unRAID? Additionally, if I were to proceed with non-ECC RAM, would there be potential risks of data corruption?

I would greatly appreciate your guidance on this matter as I want to ensure the best possible setup for my NAS system.

Thank you in advance for your assistance and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best regards,

[Squid]

The pros / cons of ECC memory are no different than with any other computer which you may own.  Not having ECC does incur the risk of data corruption on any system.  Its primary up to your own budget and risk avoidance.

 

Personally, I don't have ECC on my Macs, my Windows boxes or on my servers.  I do every once in a while (~6 months) run a memtest where feasible.  FWIW I've never once had corruption on any system I own AFAIK

[Hoopster]

49 minutes ago, Himala said:

the necessity of ECC RAM when using unRAID. Is ECC RAM a requirement

No, ECC is not required.  It's a personal choice. 

 

I have three Unraid servers; one with ECC RAM and two with non-ECC RAM.  In the one with ECC, I chose to use it because the motherboard and CPU are server grade and support ECC, so I decided to install ECC RAM in that server. 

[Himala]

Thank you for you replay. 

[Himala]

I have a few additional questions regarding the capabilities and compatibility of unRAID:

1. Running unRAID as a VM: I currently have a Proxmox setup and am considering running unRAID as a VM within it. My plan is to use PCI passthrough for my SAS controller. The primary reason for this approach is to minimize hardware requirements, space, and electricity consumption. My current storage consists mostly of pictures (around 4TB of RAW images) and some business files. For reference, I'm currently using a Windows Server 2012 as my file server. Is it feasible to run unRAID in such a configuration?
2. Backup with iDrive: I regularly back up most of my files to iDrive. Is there an option or a recommended method to integrate iDrive with unRAID for backups?
3. Hosting VMs and iSCSI: I'm considering allocating a portion of my disk space to host VMs for testing and lab work, with approximately 80% of these VMs being non-mission critical. I'm currently using Proxmox as my hypervisor and would like to attach the disk space from unRAID to Proxmox using iSCSI. Is this configuration possible with unRAID?
4. Active Directory Integration: Another important aspect for me is the integration with Active Directory. I'd like to know if it's possible to connect unRAID to an Active Directory and inherit user permissions for file shares directly from AD. This would greatly simplify user management and access control for me. Can you provide information on this capabilitys?

Your insights on these matters would be invaluable as I finalize my decision on the setup. I appreciate your time and assistance.

Best regards,

[JonathanM]

Unraid as a VM client is not officially supported. It's not forbidden or actively discouraged, but if you have issues the first troubleshooting step will be to recreate the issue running on bare metal. There is a forum section specifically for those who choose to run it as a VM client so they can help each other. New releases are not validated against the huge variety of virtualization platforms, so if there is a breaking change you will be on your own along with the other brave souls running Unraid as a VM to figure out how to make it work. If a fix is found that won't effect the bare metal user base Limetech will likely eventually include it, but it's not a priority.