Cheapest NAS With ECC RAM

[nullack]

Hi,

Whats the cheapest NAS I could buy with ECC RAM?

Thanks

 

[Generic George]

Hi,

Whats the cheapest NAS I could buy with ECC RAM?

Thanks

You do realize that ECC ram is just a reliability enhancement and not a very important one unless absolute reliability is a necessity. Which is not something that's compatible with "cheapest". So, if you are looking for cheapest, then having ECC ram probably shouldn't be your primary concern.

Other things like your HDs, the power supplies and ethernet ports are much, much more likely to cause problems or fail than the ram is.

Can you tell us why you think you need this?

 

[nullack]

Theres a reason why real file servers use ECC ram

It's data suicide to not run ECC ram for a file server that is never turned off, thats on 24/7. Especially when using software style fake raid like that found in most NAS's as unlike HBA's that have SoC raid H/W acceleration with ECC DRAM within the HBA, in software raid the parity calculations are done in main memory. Worst of all is data itself being corrupted by a bit flip in RAM and it gets written to disk.

The cost of unbufferred ECC ram isnt much more, and in some cases is the same, as unbufferred non-ECC ram. You dont have to use registered ECC with some AMD and Intel chipsets.

Most AMD chips support ECC RAM. With Intel it's only Xeons but there is pretty cheap Xeons around in UP style setups. I dont agree with you that ECC RAM adds heaps of costs to a setup.

The loss of a PSU or NIC isnt a big deal in comparison to bit rot, to silent corruption. Its obvious when a PSU or NIC has failed as opposed to corruption in data which isnt always so obvious until its far too late when its gotten into backups. I can afford an outage to swap a PSU, I can't afford digital content to become corrupted.

I can understand if you guys have bought NAS's without ECC RAM and want to try and defend your purchase decisions by arguing ECC RAM isnt necessary in a 24/7 file server. Bit flips are a real issue and this is why real servers use methods to either correct single bit errors or halt the os or use more advanced methods such as chipkill for multibit flip handling.

Bottom line, I want an ECC RAM NAS, so my question is whats the cheapest one? I see synology and netgear have some ECC ram equipped NAS's in their product lines.

 

[GregN]

ECC vs. Non-ECC is a bit of a on-going religious argument, sorry you fell into it ( see this thread if you care )

I don't know which Consumer NASes have ECC vs those that don't, the Product Finder doesn't detail that. It does detail which CPU is being used, that might help.

But I do agree with you, you show up looking for a NAS shaped like a pink tea cup, we shouldn't argue with you about how a blue coffee cup one would be so much better...

 

[nullack]

Mate I took a look at the other thread. I see your view is "If it is happening it is so lost in the noise it doesn't matter."

That is the central issue. If the type of digital content you have means that flipping a bit does matter, you do need ECC RAM.

Its not a religious argument, it is a scientific argument. Real file servers use ECC RAM for scientific reasons.

That MS study done, it's out of date in comparison to a large study done by google.

The google study showed that most RAM errors come from faulty modules which is to be expected. However, the remainder are due to environmental radiation sources where healthy DRAMs are bit flipping, to a higher rate than previously thought which again is to be expected because the nanometer mask sized used in the construction of modern DRAMs is much smaller than years past...Interestingly radiation hardened chips used in say space satellites all use old tech "large" size nanometer masks when fabbed.

Plus, the rate of bit flips increases when the DRAM density goes up.

So the problem is going to get worse as time goes on because:
1. People are using more RAM
2. The chips keep being made to a smaller size

 

[GregN]

Mate...

Its not a religious argument, it is a scientific argument. Real file servers use ECC RAM for scientific reasons.

That MS study done, it's out of date in comparison to a large study done by google.

The google study showed that most RAM errors come from faulty modules which is to be expected.

Plus, the rate of bit flips increases when the DRAM density goes up.

Dude,

Sorry, the "religious" adjective on "argument" is meant to describe the tone, not the nature of the argument.

Interestingly, my take on the google study was that ECC is not necessary. And my take on the microsoft study was ECC is necessary. The microsoft study showed that read only portions of kernel memory were coming back in submitted memory dumps as changed, and more often than they thought. The epidemiology show more memory corruption than predicted.

I initially took the position that the bit flips were lost in the noise, and it was a low probability occurrence ( in comparison ). But I read various write-up about it, and was swayed by the evidence that I was wrong ( hence my surprise at the microsoft paper ).

The religious tone I spoke of is in evidence here, I actually am agreeing with you, ECC is significant, and if your data is important to you, use it ( and that opinion hasn't changed) But you immediately jumped to the conclusion that I was arguing the point, when I wasn't.

I do think, non-reactionary discussion of what we read and see is significant. My DIY file server does use ECC memory, but that is more a by product of platform choice (dual Xeon) than conscious selection.

I do think that disagreeing with folks selection criteria, is generally fruitless. Pointing out alternatives, yes - a statement that it doesn't make sense doesn't help anyone.

 

[claykin]

If you insist on ECC RAM, search around. Netgear, QNAP and Synology all make Linux based NAS appliances that support ECC RAM. They aren't cheap, but will accomplish what you wish.

Alternatively, stop by Dell and look @ the various Windows Storage Server setups they sell with ECC.

 

[stevech]

related...

I have a 150 or so GB of video and pictures and downloaded software archived on a Win XP computer, with shares. Another computer, Win 7, stores files now and then (via FireFOx downloads or Win Explorer saves), across a Gb LAN.

There are perhaps 20,000 files in the archives (my data, not operating system).

Any guesses why this happens:
Once or twice a month, one or two files that have been sitting there for months/years and not opened will have their parent folder corrupted. Sometimes the attribute bits get hosed; sometimes the folder name becomes an illegal file name. CHKDSK never finds these. Sometimes I cannot delete the bad folder- I have to cut/paste it to the root and copy over a backup copy from another computer.

One thing I tried was erase/reformat the drive and copy back all the files/folders (20,000 or so). Weeks later, it happened again on successive days. The drive is a 200GB IDE, not SATA.

Then I put a USB 2GB drive on that computer. Doggone if that drive didn't do the same thing a couple of times. I begin to wonder: undetected RAM errors? Undetected ethernet faults (despite TCP)?

The computer in question is on 24/7, runs XP, doesn't act like it has memory errors as far as applications crashing. SageTV runs on it and records HDTV files, on different drives that are SATA, not IDE. I haven't seen corrupt video playbacks.

I'm stumped.

 

[nullack]

Hello gents,

So after doing my research I am now seriously looking at the Synology DS3611xs

http://www.synology.com/products/product.php?product_name=DS3611xs&lang=enu

Steve, recommend you loop memtest from a boot cd to test the ram for a few days

Also in a windows command prompt "sfc /scannow" will integrity check key windows files for corruption

 

[GregN]

Hello gents,

So after doing my research I am now seriously looking at the Synology DS3611xs

Over $3K with no drives and 2GB RAM, jeez I'll build you a 20 drive NAS, with fibre, 8GB ECC memory, AND I'll include drives for that.

...and I'll make money.

 

[nullack]

Hi,

I can buy it in Aus for 2500, not 3 grand in USD

I considered three options:

1, lsi sas/sata 8 port 6gb/s raid card supporting uefi, BBU module, mini sas to 4 fan out cables x2, 8x 2tb sas 7200rpm HDDs, 2x 4in3 sas backplanes and whack it all in my existing server.....which runs windows server so I cant run consumer drives on raid due to no tler and I dont have the ram for more virtual machines to work around it by running virtualised bsd for example. enterprise sata drives are more expensive for some bizzare reason than sas ones in Aus currently

2, Rack mount style 12 sas/sata hot swap chassis (this alone is pricey), xeon e3, 16GB ecc unbufferred (zfs likes ram in particular), 12x consumer sata 3tb drives run either zfs on bsd or btrfs (new build has btfsck) on gentoo or similar

3, the synology nas

Im not fixed in my direction and I welcome insights

What I dont like about 1 is that Im out of pcie slots and Id have to dump one of my other cards and Im loathe to do that

Option 2, a rack mount case isnt the footprint size I want and in hot swap they are priecy plus the dual psus are noisy. Maybe I could go external and say use an atx server mobo. I got frustrated that the e3 xeons only support unbuffered and not registered ram so I'm a bit ram limited for zfs if I expand it into the future and keep to the 1tb per 1gb ram rule. BTRFS doesnt need as much ram but then Im dealing with a newer fs. Then I got frustrated over the asus p8b motherboard which I learnt has lots of problems with ecc ram and the supermicro up socket 1155 mobos dont support USB 3 or esata.......Plus the supermicros had stuff all in the way of pcie slots. I'd allready have to use up one to get the needed number of sata iii ports I'd need. Plus it all adds up, a decent psu rated for gold efficiency isnt cheap for example.

Maybe in the morning option 2 will grow on me some more but Im not happy with the options I know of for a UP server setup currently

Then option 2 I have the hassles like installing a dlna server on say bsd and generally getting the software all ok.

 

[nullack]

Hmmmm just having a look at the diy san for 1000 usd for some ideas on improving option 2

 

[GregN]

Hmmmm just having a look at the diy san for 1000 usd for some ideas on improving option 2

haha, that is what I was going to point you at....What is Australian for EBay?

 

[Generic George]

Theres a reason why real file servers use ECC ram

It's data suicide to not run ECC ram for a file server that is never turned off, thats on 24/7. Especially when using software style fake raid like that found in most NAS's as unlike HBA's that have SoC raid H/W acceleration with ECC DRAM within the HBA, in software raid the parity calculations are done in main memory. Worst of all is data itself being corrupted by a bit flip in RAM and it gets written to disk.

The cost of unbufferred ECC ram isnt much more, and in some cases is the same, as unbufferred non-ECC ram. You dont have to use registered ECC with some AMD and Intel chipsets.

Most AMD chips support ECC RAM. With Intel it's only Xeons but there is pretty cheap Xeons around in UP style setups. I dont agree with you that ECC RAM adds heaps of costs to a setup.

The loss of a PSU or NIC isnt a big deal in comparison to bit rot, to silent corruption. Its obvious when a PSU or NIC has failed as opposed to corruption in data which isnt always so obvious until its far too late when its gotten into backups. I can afford an outage to swap a PSU, I can't afford digital content to become corrupted.

I can understand if you guys have bought NAS's without ECC RAM and want to try and defend your purchase decisions by arguing ECC RAM isnt necessary in a 24/7 file server. Bit flips are a real issue and this is why real servers use methods to either correct single bit errors or halt the os or use more advanced methods such as chipkill for multibit flip handling.

Bottom line, I want an ECC RAM NAS, so my question is whats the cheapest one? I see synology and netgear have some ECC ram equipped NAS's in their product lines.

I know what ECC ram is and why it is used, but when you post a 1 line request with no budget range or specs and saying you are looking for the cheapest. It makes you sound like someone who is looking to spend $200-300 and has gotten it into their heads that ECC is really important for some reason. ECC memory simply isn't an important thing to be looking for when it comes to products in that kind of a price range.

When you are talking about spending several thousand dollars, "cheapest" isn't really a relevant factor. At that kind of price point it's much more about what you need and what the trade offs are.

 

[nullack]

George I respect your right to have an opinion, but it's one that I'll never agree with.

To me, the argument that says cos someone is buying a NAS that costs only a few hundred bucks, that they deserve to buy unreliable equipment is unacceptable.

That argument is especially problematic when the actual cost difference of ECC vs non-ECC unbufferred ram modules is very small indeed. In fact I can buy ECC unbuffered RAM cheaper than what some retailers are selling non ecc ram for just by shopping around and finding a more price competitive retailer.

ECC is important to anyone who wants data to be safe from bit flips, regardless of how much the hardware costs that the data resides on.

 

[Generic George]

George I respect your right to have an opinion, but it's one that I'll never agree with.

Are you getting paid to sell ECC memory or something?

Obviously you missed the point in my initial post when I asked why you thought you needed it and what your budget and needs were. A simple "I'm building a high end NAS with gobs of storage" would have sufficed.

I am not a mind reader. I can not psychically tell from "What's the cheapest Nas with ECC ram" how knowledgeable you are or even what you are really looking for and why.

I do see what GregN meant by ECC being a "religious" topic. You certainly seem to believe in it with that kind of fervor.

You don't seem to be able to distinguish between "not the most important feature" and "You should buy junk that will trash your data".

To me, the argument that says cos someone is buying a NAS that costs only a few hundred bucks, that they deserve to buy unreliable equipment is unacceptable.

ACKKKK!!! My god the nas we've been using at my business for the past year without ECC ram has just exploded killing all of us because of the lack of ECC ram.

Despite what you apparently believe the lack of ECC does not mean your NAS or computer is going to instantly self destruct and destroy all your data. People have gotten along without it for decades and will continue to get along without it without the sky falling.

I agree it is a desirable feature, ESPECIALLY, if you have a really large NAS and it is going to become increasingly important as the amount of data stored grows. I'm simply not convinced that for someone who only has a couple of hundred bucks to spend that it is THE ONLY feature they need to be looking for.

Suggesting that there are other characteristics that might be important if budgets are tight does not amount to telling people they should buy unreliable junk. ECC memory does not guarantee there will be no problems, nor that the hard drive won't fail. There is a LOT more to what makes a good reliable NAS than simply having ECC memory.

That argument is especially problematic when the actual cost difference of ECC vs non-ECC unbufferred ram modules is very small indeed. In fact I can buy ECC unbuffered RAM cheaper than what some retailers are selling non ecc ram for just by shopping around and finding a more price competitive retailer.

ECC is important to anyone who wants data to be safe from bit flips, regardless of how much the hardware costs that the data resides on.

Most cheap NAS do not have upgradeable OR REPLACEABLE ram. So the cost or availability of ECC is irrelevant if it's impossible to change it.

If you've only got $200 to spend on a nas, it doesn't really matter if it's "only" $250 for ECC. Not everyone has large sums of cash to throw around on something like this. Sometimes you have to make trade offs and you can't get everything you'd want or even need and have to get by with what you can get.

 

[stevech]

There are error sources other than RAM (with/without ECC).
The error rates are small but finite:

Motherboard backplane bus
Disk drive interface to backplane
RAM buffer inside disk drive
SATA interface packet buffer, both ends of the cable
Undetected bit error despite error checking code for disk media read/write
gamma ray penetrating integrated circuit
etc.

It's a question of how many powers of 10 improvement versus cost.

 

[00Roush]

Hi,

Whats the cheapest NAS I could buy with ECC RAM?

Thanks

Basically if you are looking for an off the shelf NAS chances are you are not going to find any that are under $1000 and use ECC RAM.

The cheap NAS units are most commonly targeted to consumers/small businesses which don't pay much attention to ECC vs NON-ECC memory. Now once you move into the "enterprise" grade NAS units you might find some that use ECC RAM but you are going to pay quite a bit for them. In the consumer space generally data integrity is not the top priority and it is assumed consumers can tolerate a higher risk of data being lost/corrupted. In the enterprise space generally data integrity is much more important and therefore technologies like ECC are implemented across the board to reduce the risk of data being lost/corrupted. NAS vendors market to these groups and price according even though, as you already pointed out, the cost of ECC memory vs Non-ECC memory is minimal. I should note however that overall platform costs are higher for a system that supports the use of ECC memory.

So far you have not really specifically mentioned any other needs for the NAS except ECC memory. Based on what has been posted so far though I gather you are looking for something that is high performance, can hold 10 drives, and is expandable. With this in mind and you mentioning the cheapest NAS I would have to say building your own would be cheapest. This does depend though on if you want a turn-key solution or not. Also if you want turn-key are you willing to pay for it. As GregN mentioned for the cost of the Synology NAS you linked to he could build an entire NAS that is more powerful and comes with the hard drives. The downsides being the case might not be as elegant as the Synology and setup time would take longer.

Option 2 you listed above would probably be the same thing I would go with. An AMD setup might also work and could quite a bit less but in general the power consumption is a bit higher at idle and much higher at load.

Hi,

Option 2, a rack mount case isnt the footprint size I want and in hot swap they are priecy plus the dual psus are noisy. Maybe I could go external and say use an atx server mobo. I got frustrated that the e3 xeons only support unbuffered and not registered ram so I'm a bit ram limited for zfs if I expand it into the future and keep to the 1tb per 1gb ram rule. BTRFS doesnt need as much ram but then Im dealing with a newer fs. Then I got frustrated over the asus p8b motherboard which I learnt has lots of problems with ecc ram and the supermicro up socket 1155 mobos dont support USB 3 or esata.......Plus the supermicros had stuff all in the way of pcie slots. I'd allready have to use up one to get the needed number of sata iii ports I'd need. Plus it all adds up, a decent psu rated for gold efficiency isnt cheap for example.

Maybe in the morning option 2 will grow on me some more but Im not happy with the options I know of for a UP server setup currently

Then option 2 I have the hassles like installing a dlna server on say bsd and generally getting the software all ok.

I understand your frustration with the E3 Xeons only supporting unbuffered ECC. However the platform can support 8GB modules its just they are not widely available yet. Although I am not sure why you will need 1 GB of memory per 1 TB of storage for ZFS. While it is true ZFS likes lots of memory, my opinion is more than 16 GB is probably only needed if you need a ton of data cached (database) and have tons of clients trying to pull data off the NAS. Also if higher performance is needed an SDD can be added as a cache drive. So how high of performance do you need? Have you looked at Tyan for 1155 motherboards? Watch out on some of those gold efficiency rated power supplies. Especially in the ATX size. Some are priced way too high to make it worth it.

Not sure if you have looked into it or not but for dlna you could always just virtualize it. For example you could load up OpenIndiana as your base OS and then install Virtual Box to do virtualization. You could then do a virtual session to install a free OS that is easy to do dlna on.

00Roush

 

[npcomplete]

Unbuffered ECC memory is very cheap now, nearly the same as non-ECC memory.
And ironically buffered/registered ECC 8GB DDR3 dimms cost less than regular, non-ECC 8GB dimms.

cheap NAS (no OS) w/ ECC: HP N36L and N40L

DIY:
Any AMD AM2/AM3/AM3+ and ASUS motherboard supports ECC

Intel i3 socket 1155 and 1156 cpus and dual core i5 socket 1156 cpus support ECC, but require more costly motherboards.

 

[GregN]

I understand your frustration with the E3 Xeons only supporting unbuffered ECC. However the platform can support 8GB modules its just they are not widely available yet. Although I am not sure why you will need 1 GB of memory per 1 TB of storage for ZFS. While it is true ZFS likes lots of memory, my opinion is more than 16 GB is probably only needed if you need a ton of data cached (database) and have tons of clients trying to pull data off the NAS. Also if higher performance is needed an SDD can be added as a cache drive. So how high of performance do you need? Have you looked at Tyan for 1155 motherboards? Watch out on some of those gold efficiency rated power supplies. Especially in the ATX size. Some are priced way too high to make it worth it.

Roush,

A Gigabyte of memory for every Terabyte. I'm not sure but I think I saw this very recommendation for ZFS in reference to de-duplication, it is possible that is where it came from.

The FreeBSD implementation of ZFS doesn't yet do de-duping does it? Does anyone other than NexentaStor EE support it. Can you use a cache drive for DeDup?