Atom Powered mini ITX with ECC?

[CLSegraves]

Hello,

I have a nice little home NAS FreeNAS box that consists of a mini ITX socket 1150 MB, an i5 processor, and 16gigs of ECC memory. It has 2 zfs logical drives, each setup as raid1.

What I would like to do is build a low power mini ITX box that would be used only for running nighlty automatic backups on the NAS. Since it wouldn't be more than a pair of 3.5" drives (a 2TB and a 4TB) that just store a copy of the NAS data (plus the day's zfs snapshots), I don't see the need for much processing power. Therefore, I figured an atom processor would be plenty. On the surface, I'd still like ECC to make sure I don't make bad copies but I'm not sure even that is necessary.

Any thoughts?

Here's an example of what I was thinking of using: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182851

Chris

 

[jgreco]

Today's Atom processors tend to be a little more pricey than those of years past. You'll get great performance plus ECC capability out of the C2550's,

The "necessity" of ECC is mainly a matter of how hurt-y it would be if you lost your primary system, then went to the backup system and found that the data was irretrievable. If you can say "I could cope with that," then non-ECC is probably fine.