ECC Ram required or just nice to have?


Sloppy

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Hi,

 

I did a lot of research on the freeNAS site before I discovered unRAID. I think unRAID is better for me because of the features it offers and I am hoping it is more user friendly. I would like to build a server for mainly storage of full quality blu ray rips and FLAC music files. I do not anticipate the need to transcode anything, I will barely need to access my server when I am off my local network. I plan on using xbmc or plex for accessing my media.

 

On the FreeNAS forums they say the best thing about freeNAS is the ZFS manager. Most insist that ECC ram is a must for the ZFS manager and as much ram as you can afford. I do not see ECC being talked about as much on this forum. I was hoping to see what everyone here thinks of ECC ram and if it is strongly advised to build a system based on that requirement.

 

Money is a big factor for me, and building a system based on ECC ram requirement really makes the cost jump for the server build. I really want to know if it is necessary. Thanks for any advice.

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ECC ram does provide an extra level of protection, but there is definitely no requirement for it with UnRAID. I would guess 80-90% of UnRAID users run with standard non-ECC ram, especially since many run minimal configs (low end, low power consumption cpu, minimal ram, etc).

 

One of the nice benefits of UnRAID is you can run with a very low end system (Atom based for instance) to serve up media. Many can dust off old computer components and get something up and running with UnRAID. If you want Plex on the box I would suggest something a bit beefier, but for XBMC this should be fine.

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thanks for the reply. I was hoping that ECC ram wasnt as necessary as people on the other forum said it was. Since this is my first build and I have a small amount of data and only have basic requirements I am going to keep this build affordable (non-ecc). Maybe in the future 5 years or so I will build something more powerful with server grade components when/if my requirements change.

 

Thanks again.

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It's simply a choice as to how much "insurance" you want for your data.  You don't, for example, need fault-tolerance in your server -- you could just use a large external drive; or even UnRAID without a parity drive.    But the cost of that extra drive for parity provides another bit of peace of mind.    Assuming you have backups of your data (you should certainly have anything you don't want to lose backed up), then the fault-tolerance on your server is simply a matter of convenience -- you can continue to use it and access everything even with a drive failure.

 

Same is true for ECC RAM -- a memory fault will normally cause a system to crash.  With ECC, MOST memory errors are corrected (most random bit errors are single-bit errors, which ECC will correct), and others are at least detected (without ECC there's no sign of a memory problem until something crashes and you happen to run a memory test).

 

Given a choice, ALWAYS use ECC memory -- but is it "necessary"?  Absolutely not.

 

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