LGA1150 board with ECC RAM support


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Can you recommend an LGA1150 board with ECC RAM support (and 6 onboard SATA ports)?

 

Is ECC RAM support actually worth the higher price or should I just stick with normal RAM (even though my server is supposed to run 24/7)?

 

 

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If you are going ECC you are likely looking at a server grade board and would be best looking at SuperMicro.

 

As to whether it's worth it or not... As you mention it is a server running 24/7, so theoretically yes, but I would be surprised if more than 10% of unRAID users do so (though the 10% is also the most vocal/knowledgeable on the forums).

 

You will also want to make sure your CPU supports ECC as lower end ones will not (check http://ark.intel.com for details on any CPU you are considering). the choice of going ECC can easily add a couple of hundred dollars to a build when you look at cpu, motherboard and RAM.

 

Is it the best solution? Yes, probably. Is it truly necessary? Questionable. Like most things - it comes down to your budget and resiliency requirements.

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Is ECC worthwhile?    Only you can answer that.  All memory chips have a very small bit error rate ... many such errors go unnoticed; and others result in strange, never-explained crashes that folks often just attribute to yet-another Windows anomaly.

 

ECC provides a level of protection against those -- correcting almost all random errors (since they tend to be single bit errors), and providing detection and notification of more significant errors.    Given a choice, I would ALWAYS use ECC RAM.  Unfortunately, as noted above, most desktop boards don't support it ... but most server-grade boards do, so if you're building a system from scratch, I'd choose a server grade board with either a Xeon or one of the Core i series chips that has ECC support (as noted above, you need to confirm that the chip you select supports ECC).

 

One other note r.e. memory reliability => if you're using unbuffered RAM (which most folks building UnRAID systems do), it's a good practice to only install 2 modules -- even if the board has room for more.    The bus loading with more than 2 modules causes significant degradation of the waveform, and can notably increase the error rate.    If you're using ECC modules, this is less of an issue, but it's still better to only install 2 modules.    With modern boards, you can easily have 16GB of RAM with a pair of 8GB modules, so it's fairly easy to stay within this restriction.

 

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Thanks! I'm aware of the price difference. So I wanted to see if it's worth it or not.

 

Finding a CPU doesn't seem to be an issue. I tried ark.intel.com already and it seems plenty of their dual core CPUs support ECC, including the Celerons I'm aiming for (Haswell or Ivy Bridge). I'm struggling finding a suitable motherboard.

 

The Supermicro looks fine. Have to see if I can get it here in Germany/EU and how much it costs here. Unfortunately, some products widely available in the US/CA are hard to find here or cost more if it's not a super-common consumer product.

 

So if anyone of you has more recommendations, keep it going. The more the better, so I have alternatives if some product is not available here or costs significantly more.

 

What do you think about the Intel Server Board DBS1200V3RPS? In the specs regarding SATA ports it says "2 x SATA-600 (RAID), 4 x SATA-300 (RAID)", so does that make 6 SATA-ports?

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... it says "2 x SATA-600 (RAID), 4 x SATA-300 (RAID)", so does that make 6 SATA-ports?

 

Yes, it has 2 SATA-3 ports and 4 SATA-2 ports.  Note that it makes no difference whether you're using SATA-2 or SATA-3 with rotating platter hard drives.    Only SSDs have sustained transfer rates fast enough to exceed SATA-2 interface speeds.

 

Edit:  It's a good choice too.  IPMI;  support for Vt-d (so passthrough will work with no issue);  Intel NICs; etc.

 

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