On the fence here, trying to consolidate my physical machines onto my Unraid system as VM's. I currently have a Asus CS 246 Pro motherboard, 9th gen i7 processor and 32gb of DDR4 memory. I plan on running 2-3 VM's on it's own 1TB nvme drive in one of the M2 slots.

 

My cache for the array is in the other m2 slot and it's a 2 TB nvme drive.

 

The board is also capable of running a xeon processor and server grade ECC Ram......would that make that much a difference or would I even need it?

 

Trying to justify the additional expense of buying ECC ram and a Xeon cpu if what I currently have would be sufficent. I haven't ran any VM's yet but I have been running this unraid server on the i7 and std ddr4 computer grade ram for a few years now and it's been pretty reliable.

 

Thanks!

Edited August 21, 20241 yr by 1971camaroguy

In a home environment running 3 vms (Pfsense, HAOS, and Ubuntu) I saw no difference switching from 128G non ecc to 128G ecc.  Used non ecc for 2 years, and have been running ecc for a year now.

If the budget is tight, I would skip the change.  If down the road you determine it is needed, go for it.

How critical is data integrity? For media streaming and most common use cases it's probably overkill. And "probably" is hedging. A flipped bit is almost surely impossible to notice.

If you're not running redundancy on the array cache I have to assume you've already decided even losing a full file isn't an issue, so no ECC is fine.