poldi
Dabbler
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2019
- Messages
- 42
Well we have to be specific here. The results Mastakilla reported on are not about ECC support on AMD but very specifically ECC support with Ryzen on the X470D4U (and variants). Ryzen is priced and marketed as consumer CPU. The stance from AMD is here that they don't outright deactivate ECC within the CPU but they leave the implementation to the motherboard manufacturers. The X470D4U happens to be one of the first AM4 boards to get an ECC stamp from ASRock and as such is a very interesting offering.I am about to build a FreeNAS storage server for an adult retraining charity (storage for the administration and course material). We are offering courses that makes it easier to re-enter the labor markt after illnes or job loss etc. As you can imagine we are not actually swimming in the money. And of course I need to do something about a good backup strategy as well. So this will swallow up most (if not all) of our budget for 2020. I thought about buying used hardware to keep costs within our means but I decided to go mostly with new hardware.
I have been reading this thread with interest because AMD seems to be at a better pricepoint at the moment. However after reading this thread, I believe there is still much uncertainty about AMD when it comes to the use of ECC memory. So I think I stay on the Intel platform and buy a Supermicro X10.../X11... motherboard with Intel CPU. A long time proofen combination.
Still, I like to compliment all the forum members for the way they have investigated this and shared the results of their research and experiments on the forum. Thumbs Up everybody.
We come to the conclusion that the error correcting side of ECC seems to be correctly implemented by ASRock however the reporting side is not available, which ASRock explains with the lack of support in the AM4 socket.
As such, if your main worry is that memory bit flips are corrected for your FreeNAS system you are fine. If you also want to know if a RAM DIMM is going bad you are plum out of luck. For production hardware this is not going to cut it but for the enthusiast home server, I am fine with that.
If you are looking for server grade CPUs from AMD you have to move to EPYC and not look at Ryzen. Actually there is the more workstation oriented Threadripper in between but if the ECC support is improved there I cannot say. Guess that is a topic for another thread.
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