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Anyone have any experience with AMD and ECC memory? I was going to do an AMD build for a NAS but the support for ecc was kinda like: “We enabled it but didn’t

• std_throwaway 7y ago
  Usually it works without problems. Check with the mainboard manufacturer if it supports ECC memory. Most do, some don't.
  • nsxwolf 7y ago
    It works, but does it “work”? As in, does it error correct? Supposedly errors are so rare I’m not even sure how you could test this.
    • agsamek 7y ago
      Rowhammer comes handy ;)
    • vbezhenar 7y ago
      Some people overclock the memory. It'll make errors at some point.
    • opencl 7y ago
      Yes it does actually work. The easiest way to intentionally trigger memory errors is overclocking. https://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/75030-ecc-memory-amds-ryzen-deep-dive.html https://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-revie...
  • wil421 7y ago
    If you look closely at what AMD says it might make you question it. They specifically say they don't disabled it on their desktop chips but they don't test it. Basically a YMMV statement.
• juergbi 7y ago
  Works fine here with 1st Gen Threadripper on ASRock X399 Taichi, running Linux. Some points: * Not all motherboards support ECC, make sure to check before buying. * Only unbuffered DIMMs are supported by Ryzen/Threadripper. * According to motherboard vendors, Ryzen APUs do not support ECC. Ryzen Pro APUs do support ECC but those SKUs are typically not available in retail.
  • flyinghamster 7y ago
    ECC is also working fine for me on the X370 Taichi with a first-gen Ryzen 7.
  • Already__Taken 7y ago
    I believe asrock are the only manufacturer that have come out and said yes we test that ecc will work it's just not a supported config. The others don't quite commit that far. I have an asrock + unbuffered ECC ryzen 5 1500 setup. I've checked windows does indeed detect errors when induced.
    • BeeOnRope 7y ago
      Curious how you induced errors?
      • toast0 7y ago
        The common way is to reduce memory voltage or tighten the timings until things start failing. Alternatively, you could probably run rowhammer PoCs.
• tiew9Vii 7y ago
  Check the motherboard specs, they are a bit hit and miss when I was looking. I am using an ASROCK - B450M Pro4, Crucial - CT16G4WFD8266 16GB ECC with a Ryzen 5 2600.
• starman100 7y ago
  That's our impression, too. There are AMD Motherboards that take ECC memory, but we've never seen them act on ECC errors that were uncorrectable (the correctably errors are handled, but uncorrectable errors aren't reported!). We will only use Intel Xeon for our work because of this. You'll get about 1 bit flip/GB/year. With 128 GB or more in our standard builds, this would be more than 2/week. We just can't have that uncertainty in the data we provide. And while Cinebench is a useful benchmark, all our heavy number crunching is done on NVidia 2080 architecture so the fact that AMD may have an advantage on some cases isn't that interesting for us. Perhaps if you're a gamer, who doesn't care about an occasional bitflip, looking to squeeze the last drop of value out for his dollar....
  • akbT 7y ago
    Supermicro lists tested ECC memory for their AMD mainboards. It would be very strange if that did not work.
  • wil421 7y ago
    Yea the new Xeon E-21XX's are proving hard to find in the consumer market. Most places are back ordered or just place orders directly with intel after you buy. The scalpers are changing $50+ or more over retail on Ebay and 3rd party Newegg/Amazon sellers.
  • fabian2k 7y ago
    If you want to compare to Xeons, the comparison aren't the consumer CPUs this is about, the AMD equivalent are the Epyc CPUs. AMD doesn't disable ECC support entirely on consumer CPUs like Intel does, but as far as I know it's also not officially supported and guaranteed to work, it's up to the mainboard vendor how to handle this. In the Intel case you simply can't get ECC with non-Xeon CPUs.
    • paol 7y ago
      > can't get ECC with non-Xeon CPUs Not quite. There are some Core branded CPUs that support ECC, including funnily enough the i3's.
• zrobotics 7y ago
  I'm genuinely curious, for a Nas does ECC RAM provide any benefit? I've always just used old desktop hardware, typically from about 4 generations prior (when I upgrade the desktop, the old hardware goes into the lab PC, and the lab PC goes into the NAS). I know there are power consumption benefits to the specialized NAS boards, but would I see any benefit from ECC? Considering the NAS is a RAID array of spinning rust drives, a flipped bit in RAM really shouldn't affect anything seriously. Or am I grossly mistaken?
  • caf 7y ago
    When you write something to the NAS, it'll land in memory before it's written out to the RAID. If you get an undetected bitflip in that memory before it's written out, it'll happily replicate that error across your RAID. Worse could happen if a RAM error corrupted the in-memory copy of filesystem metadata (like an extent map) - subsequent writes that rely on that metadata could then cause gnarly corruption.
  • vel0city 7y ago
    If that bit flips in RAM before being written to disk, you now have a flipped bit in your file when it gets put on disk. Depending on when this happens, even a super-resilient file system like ZFS may not notice the corruption if this bit flip happens before checksumming the block.
  • gothroach 7y ago
    If you're running a decent size NAS with ZFS datastores, not running ECC is borderline negligent.
    • Dylan16807 7y ago
      Upgrading one link in the chain while leaving another link alone is not borderline negligent, and people need to stop saying that.
    • tracker1 7y ago
      What about the computer over the network sending the data to the NAS? It won't ever bitflip in memory?