ECC Ram

[Breeze]

I am new to FreeNas after building my new server and researching available NAS downloads I installed Free Nas. Have 4 3XTB drives but have been told now that i should have error checking Ram ? I have 8 gigs of DDR3 Ram . I have set a Z1 Raid but am concerned now that i will have issues with ram and could loose everything Is this true ? Should I change to UFS.

 

[jgreco]

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-ram-and-zfs.15449/

This topic has been beaten to death.

 

[nojohnny101]

@Breeze welcome to FreeNAS! I am fairly new to these forums as well but just a word of advice: there are a lot of helpful people on here (@jgreco being on of them) but help will only be offered when proper research is done. The question you are asking has been "beaten to death" as jgreco said.

In short, not having ECC ram is not guaranteeing loss of data, it just greatly increases the risk. Most people rightly believe it is smart not to take that risk, myself included.

 

[Mlovelace]

I'll give you a quote from Matthew Ahrens, one of the cofounders of ZFS at Sun Microsystems and current ZFS developer at Delphix, and let you decide.

"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."

 

[Breeze]

Thanks for Reply's
Not one to beat a Dead Horse; since i don't have the budget to replace MB and get ECC Ram, and I am found of the data i plan on placing on this, FreeNas has done away with UFS, Looks like time to "Scub" this drive and go with something that doesn't have this requirement.

 

[jgreco]

It's not a requirement. And thinking that you can get away with it by using something else is laughable. Bad RAM can ruin your day with any filesystem.

So the real question *SHOULD* be, do you love your data? If you love your data, you want something that'll protect your data. That's probably ZFS. And ECC. And RAIDZ2 redundancy.

 

[danb35]

since i don't have the budget to replace MB and get ECC Ram, and I am found of the data i plan on placing on this

If you care about the data you're storing, you should use ECC memory. This is true whether you're using ZFS, UFS, ext4fs, NTFS, or any other filesystem. It's true whether you're running FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, or any other OS.

Edit: The Dell PowerEdge T20 is a complete server, supports ECC, and can be had for under $200 brand new. Add another $50-60 for an 8 GB stick of ECC RAM and you're ready to go.