ECC RAM Freenas

vorb · 12 Jul 2016 at 13:02

Hey, i'm going to build my first small Freenas server and they strongly recommend using ECC Ram (1GB per TB) but i can't find many motherboards that run them (itx). Apparently they protect your data much better than DDR3 or non - EEC and overall functionality of the server.

Does it matter about the motherboard or is it the cpu that the ECC ram depends on to run properly or both?

I'm bit of a noob here, so sorry

bremen1874 · 12 Jul 2016 at 13:49

If you're talking Intel I believe you'd need a Xeon for ECC support. I'm not sure about the chipset requirements.

If this is for home use you can almost certainly don't need ECC. Just buy decent quality components and run them within spec.

If it's for business buy a prebuilt server that'll have ECC support out of the box.

vorb · 12 Jul 2016 at 15:32

This is for home use, yes. So i will be fine then going with intel and drr3. That was the plan until i did a bit of research so always better to ask, thanks.

Borealis · 12 Jul 2016 at 16:00

If you want to use ECC RAM, you need a Xeon and a motherboard that's compatible with ECC RAM. If it's for home use, I'd echo bremen's advice and forget about Xeons and ECC RAM.

drakioned · 12 Jul 2016 at 16:19

You can buy a HP Microserver and use ECC unregistered RAM.

If you're planning to use ZFS, then ECC is highly recommended.

neodude · 12 Jul 2016 at 16:47

As above, you need Xeon and compatible MB for ECC RAM. The spec in my sig would do the trick, not cheap though.

joeyjojo · 12 Jul 2016 at 17:22

ECC or not depends on your attitude to risk.

Non-ECC RAM suffers random errors at a rate of about 1-5 per hour per 8 GB of RAM. If you're frequently reading and writing files from memory that's a very real risk of corruption.

Also as drakioned says, not having ECC undermines a lot of the protections that error-correcting filesystems can offer.

Depends how much effort you want to put in to protect your data from corruption.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/...is-the-probability-they-will-affect-a-program
https://hardforum.com/threads/data-integrity-the-risks-of-not-using-ecc-with-zfs-a-study.1689724/

drakioned · 12 Jul 2016 at 17:39

neodude said:
As above, you need Xeon and compatible MB for ECC RAM. The spec in my sig would do the trick, not cheap though.

No, a HP Microserver G7 would do it. They're about £100 on eBay.

drakioned · 12 Jul 2016 at 17:47

joeyjojo said:
ECC or not depends on your attitude to risk.

Non-ECC RAM suffers random errors at a rate of about 1-5 per hour per 8 GB of RAM. If you're frequently reading and writing files from memory that's a very real risk of corruption.

Also as drakioned says, not having ECC undermines a lot of the protections that error-correcting filesystems can offer.

Depends how much effort you want to put in to protect your data from corruption.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/...is-the-probability-they-will-affect-a-program
https://hardforum.com/threads/data-integrity-the-risks-of-not-using-ecc-with-zfs-a-study.1689724/

ZFS has more problems than normal with bad RAM. Because the data scrubbing process would try to correct, you can get into a data corruption/correction attempt loop that corrupts more and more of your data.

If you're not using ZFS, then it's probably less of a problem.

philip2009 · 12 Jul 2016 at 17:52

If you read comments by some of the blowhard(Cyberjock?) regulars on the FreeNAS forums you'd think it was the end of the world not to use ECC with ZFS, I'd suggest reading this -

Will ZFS and non-ECC RAM kill your data?

Also -

I don’t care about your logic! I wish to appeal to authority!

OK. “Authority” in this case doesn’t get much better than Matthew Ahrens, one of the cofounders of ZFS at Sun Microsystems and current ZFS developer at Delphix. In the comments to one of my filesystem articles on Ars Technica, Matthew said “There’s nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem.”

joeyjojo · 12 Jul 2016 at 18:00

^ Wow, that last bit completely misrepresents Ahren's post. The post actually says

There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag (zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the window of vulnerability from a memory error.

I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS.

i.e. we should use ECC with every filesystem, including ZFS.

The article does counter drakioned's point though. I have no comment on that.

philip2009 · 12 Jul 2016 at 18:12

The quote is in the context of the blog post title, ZFS is not a special case filesystem.

Caged · 12 Jul 2016 at 23:19

I wouldn't get too precious about the 1GB of RAM per 1TB of storage in a home system.

ECC RAM is a tough one. If you're just filling it with films then don't bother. If you are putting irreplaceable photos on there then use ECC, but also make sure you have a backup. If the NAS is a backup target for your main PC and your main PC also uploads to a service like CrashPlan, then ECC becomes less important.

As with lots of things there's no hard and fast rule, you need to weigh up cost vs. need.

vorb · 13 Jul 2016 at 08:10

The bulk of my info will be movies, tv shows, plex media server and prob like a mumble server.

Also i'd like to go with recommended hardware for FreeNas, I spent way more time than i thought i would have, trying to find ECC compatible components, from mobo->ram->xeon chipsets as its not a filter option in the menu nor is there much info online about them, while at the same time trying to keep cost down low.
So im going to just go with a simple setup, what do you think of this little build? Anything i should change? I will be adding more HDD's in the future but for now to get thing running, i think this may do.

Fractal Design Mini-ITX NODE 304 Case White
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/fractal-design-node-304-htpc-chassis-white-ca-024-fd.html

ASUS S1151 Mini-ITX H110I-PLUS-D3 DDR3
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/asus...cket-1151-ddr3-itx-motherboard-mb-664-as.html

16GB DDR3 Kingston HX318C10FBK2/16 (2x8G) 1866MHz HyperX FURY BLACK RAM
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/king...al-channel-kit-hx318c10fbk2-16-my-196-ks.html

Intel S1151 Pentium G4400 3.30Ghz Dual Core CPU PN BX80662G4400
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/inte...ocket-lga1151-processor-retail-cp-593-in.html

3TB WD 3.5" SATA 6Gb/s Red HDD PN WD30EFRX
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/wd-r...-s-64mb-cache-hdd-oem-wd30efrx-hd-398-wd.html

550 Watt Fractal Design Integra M 80+ Bronze Modular Power Supply

joeyjojo · 13 Jul 2016 at 08:17

You'll probably get better responses in "Servers and Enterprise Solutions" or "General Hardware". (You can RTM your own post to get it moved - the little red triangle symbol.)

That Pentium system should be fine though. I'd probably put less RAM in it tbh especially if you're only going to be using a couple of clients simultaneously. I'd be surprised if 8 or even 4 GB wasn't enough for basic streaming. Also that PSU is way too large, you want something in the 150 W sort of size, and ideally higher rated (Platinum, Gold, Silver).

drakioned · 13 Jul 2016 at 09:54

joeyjojo said:
i.e. we should use ECC with every filesystem, including ZFS.

The article does counter drakioned's point though. I have no comment on that.

It's not ZFS itself that can get into the corruption loop, it's the scrub process of RAIDZ. If you're not planning on using RAIDZ, then doesn't matter. You'd have a similar problem with other software RAID 5/6.

bremen1874 · 13 Jul 2016 at 13:00

Given the choice between those parts and a mini server such as the HP Microserver or the Dell T20 I know what I'd choose. For the same money you could probably get one with a Xeon and ECC support.

Not as small or pretty, but who looks at a NAS?

philip2009 · 13 Jul 2016 at 14:15

Can't you get the Dell T20(Pentium G3320 - 3GHz, 4GB ECC, no hard drives) for about £70 after the Dell £70 rebate offer? Fairly small tower.

Borealis · 13 Jul 2016 at 14:24

The motherboard you've listed is a DDR3 board. IIRC, regular DDR3 voltages can damage Skylake - which is why you're supposed to use DDR3L low-voltage RAM.

This is the DDR4 version of that board:

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/asus...cket-1151-ddr4-itx-motherboard-mb-687-as.html

It's slightly cheaper as well.

tumtums · 14 Jul 2016 at 12:34

The reason why you're struggling finding a suitable board is because you're looking in the wrong place. You're building a server not a desktop!

Check out their best practice guide here :
http://www.freenas.org/blog/a-compl...are-design-part-i-purpose-and-best-practices/

Also you should be on their hardware section of their forum. There's some great information there.