5 ms·
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
by 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 agoWhen 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 agoIf 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 agoIf you're running a decent size NAS with ZFS datastores, not running ECC is borderline negligent.
- Dylan16807 7y agoUpgrading one link in the chain while leaving another link alone is not borderline negligent, and people need to stop saying that.
- tracker1 7y agoWhat about the computer over the network sending the data to the NAS? It won't ever bitflip in memory?