ECC?

[Zdroj]

Greetings,

Totally new to all of this NAS stuff, but I've been building computers for many years, and the prospect of building a home NAS is intriguing. I've been reading the forum posts for a while, and my 4 new WD4000F9YZ's are still wrapped awaiting a decision on how to go about attacking the home NAS problem.

I've been looking at NAS products and reading reviews from all over the Internet in order to determine whether or not to buy or build. Synology appears to be universally recognized as one of, if not the best (home/small business) NAS products around, and I'm intrigued by the Asustor AS-608T, although it may need to mature a bit. Of course, the FreeNAS Mini(plus) is "advertised" as well.

One thing I don't see in these consumer products is ECC ram. While many forum members talk about its importance (scrubs, etc.), the specs for these products, including the FreeNAS Mini products, do not stipulate that ECC ram is being used...so how critical is it, really? Is it truly the case that these companies, and others (and me...if I opt for a build with non-ECC), are building products that actually jeopardize the user's data, because ECC ram isn't being utilized?

 

[gpsguy]

Please read jgreco's message regarding hardware suggestions. In it, he talks about the merits of ECC RAM.

In my home lab, I put ECC memory in both my FreeNAS server and ESXi server.

 

[Zdroj]

Well OK gpsguy...I guess ECC is where it's at. Thanks for the link/advice.

I still don't understand why many consumer NAS products don't use it...unless it's not so critical for many non-ZFS based systems.

 

[cyberjock]

It's not critical for non-ZFS. ZFS has extra layers of protection, and those layers of protection, if corrupted, will corrupt data instead of repairing it. Hence the need for ECC for ZFS vice other filesystems.

 

[Zdroj]

Thanks, cyberjock...so...and the answer to this question seems to me to be a no-brainer, but I just want to make sure I'm straight on this...since FreeNAS is ZFS...if the FreeNAS Mini(Plus) does not come with ECC (and the specs do not indicate that it does)...then I should avoid it if I value my data...just as I should avoid any other ZFS-based NAS that does not spec ECC?

 

[cyberjock]

Exactly!

I went without ECC when I built the first system. But after seeing how catastrophic a memory error is to so many users, I don't joke around with non-ECC anymore. In fact, i just closed a window where someone had bad RAM and he might be lucky and still have data after this is done. http://forums.freenas.org/threads/chksum-errors-on-scrub.14293/#post-68633