Does ECC RAM help in a home-use NAS?

You do not NEED to use ECC RAM in a home server.

If you are using ZFS though, ECC is generally believed to be highly advisable (but if you dig through basis of the claims, not really more so then for any other type of file systems)

If the data you are storing is vitally important, and loosing even 1 file is a massive problem, get ECC Ram. If its for general use, you don't need really need ECC ram - your computers probably don't have it, so data can't be THAT critical.

Typical NAS appliances do not use ECC RAM.

If its between buying ECC RAM and more redundant disk - more disk should win out pretty much every time.

davidgo

Posted 2017-10-09T03:57:17.933

Reputation: 49 152

Thanks David, i do value my data, it's a documentary collection, and some videos are very rare. The price diference is relatively small : 135$ for Kingston ECC 8GB DDR4 2133MHz RAM vs 86$ Crucial 8GB DDR4 2133MHz. I am not using ZFS, but Storage Spaces (software RAID). I've read that both the Asrock X370 Taichi and the Ryzen cpu work with ECC RAM. Will i have problems with this system? since i can't find many people that have this hardware together. The HDDs will be WD 10TB NAS RED – doc – 2017-10-09T07:10:54.343

Sorry, I don't know much about Ryzen systems, but AMD systems are more likely to work with ECC then Intel desktops. I found myself a bargain E3-1230v3 Intel system for my recent NAS build. – davidgo – 2017-10-09T07:14:59.283

1This is sort of off topic, but why would you worry about a small increase in % project cost for the peace of mind that ECC can provide? When data scales, ECC becomes more relevant and 100TB is at the scale where ECC can help. And the cost of ECC pales in comparison to the cost of 100TB of drives and supporting hardware. I think you might be missing the forest through the trees. Just a "comment". – Damon – 2017-10-10T05:12:24.090

Does ECC RAM help in a home-use NAS?

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