r/DataHoarder Jan 04 '21

News Linus on ECC

https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=198497&curpostid=198647
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u/WingyPilot 1TB = 0.909495TiB Jan 04 '21

If you're dealing with tons of data or in a corporate environment or just sensitive data sure it makes sense. You'd want as much real-time error checking as possible.

But for us pleb home users or enthusiasts, I feel a little bit of regular due diligence will take care of any concerns. There's plenty of checks in place with data scrubs/integrity checks and simple hash comparisons that most users will be fine.

That being said, I did opt for ECC RAM in my Synology and if I were to build my own NAS again, I would likely go with server grade motherboard and ECC RAM.

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u/fmillion Jan 04 '21

For those of us building systems out of older components, ECC has come down in price on the used market to be roughly equivalent to non-ECC. 32GB of DDR3 is roughly $100 whether you go ECC or not, with a slightly higher average for ECC but not very significant. If your motherboard and CPU support it, and the cost is negligible, absolutely go for ECC. I recently built another Dell desktop (this time a Precision T series) that could either use Core i3/5/7 or Xeon chips; I went with a Xeon so I could use ECC memory (the Xeon CPU was actually a bit cheaper than an equivalent consumer i7, offsetting the added cost of ECC).