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Is ECC ram better for building my own NAS

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Quozlator

Occasional Visitor
So I built my first NAS with older equipment. But I also have an X570 Asus MOBO and a 3700 cpu, so I was thinking of upgrading my setup to use the newer equipment. But I'm not taking any RAM away from my dasily driver and the older system is DDR2 or whatever came before I built stuff.

So somewhere along the many many many videos and web pages I've been reading I thought I saw that goiing ECC is the better way to go for your homebrew NAS, that it kept the data from getting corrupted somehow?? Is this correct, and since it seems tro be easy to keep the ram cost under $100, how much ram should I go with? Is 32 Gb enouigh, should I aim higher? I only have 4 slots, so I'd rather plan ahead on this part, I don't want to be trying to sell off ram to upgrade.

Thanks for any assistance. (I tried doing a search on this forum for "ecc ram, ddr3 ecc ram but it wasn't happy with my search)
 
I've just used regular system ram and Linux. Not an issue in at least the last 5 years. I put 16gb init but, Linux based only typically used about 4gb at any given time. For the sake of less downtime 2 sticks of 4gb would be my minimum.

It also depends on the raid version a bit as well. I use raid 10 so, there's not much to calculate like other versions. The filesystem makes a difference too. ZFS will use whatever you give it but, it's not necessary to load it up with a ton of ram for it to work.
 
So somewhere along the many many many videos and web pages I've been reading I thought I saw that goiing ECC is the better way to go for your homebrew NAS, that it kept the data from getting corrupted somehow?? Is this correct,

The point of ECC (error correcting) RAM is that it can correct or at least detect single-bit corruptions of data stored in the RAM, as can happen from cosmic rays or whatever. Now the odds of such corruption aren't that high to begin with, but it can happen, and people like to have some defense against it. It matters more in machines with more RAM and more ability to keep the same data in RAM for a long time, and in servers where you'd like 100% uptime (since corruption in the memory holding software is likely to end in a crash). Personally I use ECC for any server machine if I have the option, but maybe I'm just conservative. Consumer-grade gear tends to not contain ECC RAM, and for the most part that seems fine.
 
For my pfsense server and TrueNAS server, i use Xeon E3 CPU's with unbuffered ECC RAM. The generation i ran before were Xeon X34xx with RDIMM ECC. Is it better than non-ECC, i don't really know. Did i ever had any probs with non-ECC in my home or office PC? Nope. Does my office PC run 24/7? Nope. The servers both do and specifically for TrueNAS, which is in need of a decent amount of RAM, ECC is strongly recommended. In the end, ECC RAM is not necessarily more expensive than non-ECC. I buy most of my stuff 2nd hand. Never had an issue.
 

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