Hardware questions RAM / Hard drive limitations

[webfreakjacob]

Hello,

I am not sure where to post these questions but I am hoping someone can direct me. I know that ECC RAM is strongly suggested with this setup.

1) My concern (which maybe addressed already) is how do you know if your ECC RAM is working?
- the test methods I found online seem to have very little luck 100% of the time
- the basic mention is that it is impossible to create a single bit failure to test the RAM
2) If if a stick fails what is the damage?

My second concern was the motherboard I have is a S5000PSL I have been able to setup with 2 x 4TB HDs. My concern is that I was initially under the understanding that this board was limited to 2TB HDs. Upon trying it I get these results:

1) Bios will not detect hard drives
2) Freenas installation both finds the hardware allows me to setup a RAID1

It seems to work fine showing the full value of the hard disk and created partition.
Is there any precedence for this? My concern is I reach a point where there could be an issue.

 

[Ericloewe]

Regarding ECC. On Intel, there's a set of commands that query the memory controller to know what the ECC status is. In practice, you're right that it's not possible to simulate a real error, so there is a bit of faith that it's actually doing its job. However, nobody's complained of ECC not working on proper server hardware, so we see no reason to doubt Intel's values.
Most DIMM failure modes will almost certainly cause an immediate system halt due to uncorrectable ECC errors or a crapton of soft errors if it's just a single bit (it'll get corrected and logged).

As for your motherboard, if FreeNAS doesn't complain, it's probably alright. However, expect bad performance from something that old.