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There's also the chance that you think you had zero problems because you never got notified. Some years ago I built a small N3150 based home server with 16GB R

There's also the chance that you think you had zero problems because you never got notified. Some years ago I built a small N3150 based home server with 16GB RAM. All was fine. But there was this one process that would always act weird after running for a couple of days. It was a Python server with long-running WebSocket connections which I had configured to use `select()` instead of `epoll()`, and for some reason it would eat up file handles until it crashed or froze, can't remember what it was, very odd stuff. I think it was running inside a Docker container and that container then behaved very strangely. Turns out that when I then made a MemTest86 it had faulty RAM. All the data which passed through that area of the RAM and got written to disk was assumed to be corrupted. After replacing the RAM (RMA) and doing a MemTest on it for a day to ensure that it was OK, that problem never appeared again. But keep in mind, this was just one specific process which showed an issue after running for a couple of days, among other long-running processes.

NikolaNovak 3y ago
1 >> I’ve done so my whole life with zero problems. 2 >> There's also the chance that you think you had zero problems because you never got notified. Both are likely true. I.e. Over my 40 years of dealing with computers ,it is likely there were errors which did not become problems. I have about 20tb of unique files in my personal storage at this point (used to run photography business, plus personal videos and photos,plus movies and tv shows, plus actually important documents which are less than 3% by size).I have about 4-8 computers running around my home doing stuff (plus dozens of computing devices - phones, googles, whatnots). I understand the overwhelming chance there were many errors over time in running computers or raid transfers or usb backups over decades. They just haven't manifested themselves as problems.
- snvzz 3y ago
  The fact that you're dealing with silent corruption does not make it any better, but in fact, much worse. And yes, the corruption is there. DRAM is alarmingly unreliable. Because no ECC, we just do not notice it most of the time, or misattribute the problems it causes.
  - qwertox 3y ago
    If you're unlucky you get into mode with ZFS where every scrub corrupts more and more data, while ZFS itself thinks that all is OK because it computes the checksum on the data it just corrupted while scrubbing. See https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-ram-and-zfs.15449/ https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-ram...
Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
You would be surprised how often the system behaves unpredictably and it is because of RAM. i had multiple times faulty ram and the symptoms are wildly different. Also, when you download large files which you can run checksun against such as steam games, it is pretty common to find minor corruption (this i verified across many computers)

NikolaNovak 3y ago

1 >> I’ve done so my whole life with zero problems. 2 >> There's also the chance that you think you had zero problems because you never got notified. Both are likely true. I.e. Over my 40 years of dealing with computers ,it is likely there were errors which did not become problems. I have about 20tb of unique files in my personal storage at this point (used to run photography business, plus personal videos and photos,plus movies and tv shows, plus actually important documents which are less than 3% by size).I have about 4-8 computers running around my home doing stuff (plus dozens of computing devices - phones, googles, whatnots). I understand the overwhelming chance there were many errors over time in running computers or raid transfers or usb backups over decades. They just haven't manifested themselves as problems.

snvzz 3y ago
The fact that you're dealing with silent corruption does not make it any better, but in fact, much worse. And yes, the corruption is there. DRAM is alarmingly unreliable. Because no ECC, we just do not notice it most of the time, or misattribute the problems it causes.
- qwertox 3y ago
  If you're unlucky you get into mode with ZFS where every scrub corrupts more and more data, while ZFS itself thinks that all is OK because it computes the checksum on the data it just corrupted while scrubbing. See https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-ram-and-zfs.15449/ https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-ram...

Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago

You would be surprised how often the system behaves unpredictably and it is because of RAM. i had multiple times faulty ram and the symptoms are wildly different. Also, when you download large files which you can run checksun against such as steam games, it is pretty common to find minor corruption (this i verified across many computers)