Ecc help

[Indian pc builder]

Ok, so an I5-12600 supports ecc, and I keep being directed to the intel w680 chipset as being key, unfortunately I only see an expensive ASUs mobo. What’s a cheaper option for ecc supporting chipset mobos on Intel?

 

also should I look Into full ecc memory or just use ddr5 4800 non ecc?

 

from the looks of things ecc is more important that checksumming the drives with zfs? Can someone quickly help me out of this rabbit hole?

 

also does the drives s.m.a.r.t test checksum the data like zfs does in scrubs?

[Electronics Wizardy]

What is this system being used for? 

I"d say for home use non-ecc is fine 

 

Ecc makes sure data stays safe in RAM. ZFS doesn't need it any more than a different filesystem. 

 

There really isn't a cheap ECC solution for that chip. If you want cheap ECC, a used platform is probably best.

[Indian pc builder]

9 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What is this system being used for? 

I"d say for home use non-ecc is fine 

 

Ecc makes sure data stays safe in RAM. ZFS doesn't need it any more than a different filesystem. 

 

There really isn't a cheap ECC solution for that chip. If you want cheap ECC, a used platform is probably best.

home server, i'm more and more paranoid about bitrot, especially as i want to use unraid, which, although can checksum with a file integrity plugin, cannot automatically fox the data, now i could still restore it but i would rather not have to deal with any errors in the first place, therefore i was originally looking at ddr5 4800 non ecc, as apparently the ddr5 standard has some limited ecc capabilities built in, but the more i'm looking through the forums and documentation, the more i'm realising that ecc memory is recommended 

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 minutes ago, Indian pc builder said:

home server, i'm more and more paranoid about bitrot, especially as i want to use unraid, which, although can checksum with a file integrity plugin, cannot automatically fox the data, now i could still restore it but i would rather not have to deal with any errors in the first place, therefore i was originally looking at ddr5 4800 non ecc, as apparently the ddr5 standard has some limited ecc capabilities built in, but the more i'm looking through the forums and documentation, the more i'm realising that ecc memory is recommended 

Your HDDs do checksum all the data, so the risk is pretty low here. I believe the parity checks will also tell you if data isn't correct even if it doesn't know which copy is right.

 

Is there a reason your set on that CPU?

[Indian pc builder]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Your HDDs do checksum all the data, so the risk is pretty low here. I believe the parity checks will also tell you if data isn't correct even if it doesn't know which copy is right.

 

Is there a reason your set on that CPU?

its the cheapest one i could find in the intel product stack that has ecc

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Indian pc builder said:

its the cheapest one i could find in the intel product stack that has ecc

Can you go used or am4?

 

Also the i3s should have ecc too.

[Indian pc builder]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Can you go used or am4?

 

Also the i3s should have ecc too.

only the embedded ones, but that's not the point, my main question at this point is now, whether i should go for ecc or just plain ddr5? using brand new matched hard drives and xfs in unraid

[LIGISTX]

20 minutes ago, Indian pc builder said:

i'm more and more paranoid about bitrot

Then you shouldn’t use unraid. Use truenas, or anything that uses ZFS. ZFS is the best option to protect data for the long term. 
 

8 minutes ago, Indian pc builder said:

only the embedded ones, but that's not the point, my main question at this point is now, whether i should go for ecc or just plain ddr5? using brand new matched hard drives and xfs in unraid

Why not get a used server system? My old i3 6100 used ECC, I bought a cheap HPE server with the i3, server chipset mobo, and RAM, all in brand new was like 250 bucks back in 2016 just for reference. Maybe pick up a cheap used xeon and mobo from eBay?

 

I would run ZFS before I worry about ECC. ZFS will scrub and compare data across all drives to make sure things don’t “rot”. ECC is helpful for this, but not strictly required. ECC is just one more way to validate nothing gets flipped in RAM. ZFS scrubs are the real answer to this problem tho, and if you are exceedingly paranoid, run Z3 instead of Z2, it gives you 50% more drives to compare data against when doing a scrub. 

[Kilrah]

29 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

Then you shouldn’t use unraid. Use truenas, or anything that uses ZFS.

Or use zfs on unraid since it's supported now.

[LIGISTX]

2 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Or use zfs on unraid since it's supported now.

I am not entirely sold on this. ZFS is ZFS, but if the goal is long term stability, personally I would trust an enterprise appliance which is TrueNAS. 
 

Yes. Truenas is just Debian now, but having the backing of iXsystems for the overall stability of the OS… that does mean a lot for stability. ZFS is where the magic is, but there is importance in doing an abundance of unit testing before pushing updates into production, and an enterprise grade appliance is going to do that better then other solutions.

[Indian pc builder]

13 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

I am not entirely sold on this. ZFS is ZFS, but if the goal is long term stability, personally I would trust an enterprise appliance which is TrueNAS. 
 

Yes. Truenas is just Debian now, but having the backing of iXsystems for the overall stability of the OS… that does mean a lot for stability. ZFS is where the magic is, but there is importance in doing an abundance of unit testing before pushing updates into production, and an enterprise grade appliance is going to do that better then other solutions.

i tried looking into truenas but was just intimidated very much by the entirety of it, unraid seemed simple and good, also the truenas forums have little support for you if you let slip you are using non ecc memory

[LIGISTX]

46 minutes ago, Indian pc builder said:

i tried looking into truenas but was just intimidated very much by the entirety of it, unraid seemed simple and good, also the truenas forums have little support for you if you let slip you are using non ecc memory

Truenas is very simple... and there are SO many guides on youtube to show you how to set it up.

 

The forums can be a little hit or miss, a few of the folks have been there for to long and just don't want to believe anyone outside of an enterprise level client could possibly use truenas, but also plenty of great folks. They are not going to refuse to help you simply because you don't have ECC RAM... and from experience, the knowledge is immense. Also check out level1techs and lawrencesystems forums, plenty of folks there know about ZFS and truenas as well if you ever run into issues.

 

I still stand by truenas, its an enterprise appliance... its just going to work, plain and simple. Unraid, who knows, its more "for fun". If you are serious about data integrity, its worth learning truenas. It really isn't very difficult.

[Kilrah]

All I see is the constant influx in the unraid community of people leaving truenas both for the toxic community and somewhat messy configutration/difficulty of setting up services

[LIGISTX]

12 hours ago, Kilrah said:

All I see is the constant influx in the unraid community of people leaving truenas both for the toxic community and somewhat messy configutration/difficulty of setting up services

Yea, it is too bad that some of the old dogs on the truenas forum are extremely set in their ways... they need to take some chill pills for sure.

 

But, its not difficult to use. Truenas was the first thing I learned in the homelab sphere about a decade ago, and its been simple enough.

 

Since I would rather not deal with "services" on my NAS, I can't really speak to how easy or difficult that is on either platform. I virtualize everything so I can leave my NAS as a NAS. IMO, especially with the performance of todays hardware, there isn't much reason not to. Use Proxmox as the host, have a NAS VM working as a NAS, and them have VM's for all the other services/containers/stuff you need. No real reason to try and shoehorn services into your NAS, just spin up dedicated VM's or containers outside of the NAS.

[TheDarkCanuck]

On 5/11/2024 at 3:30 PM, LIGISTX said:

Since I would rather not deal with "services" on my NAS, I can't really speak to how easy or difficult that is on either platform. I virtualize everything so I can leave my NAS as a NAS. IMO, especially with the performance of todays hardware, there isn't much reason not to. Use Proxmox as the host, have a NAS VM working as a NAS, and them have VM's for all the other services/containers/stuff you need. No real reason to try and shoehorn services into your NAS, just spin up dedicated VM's or containers outside of the NAS.

What if you want to use your NAS to store ISOs and vm images?  

[LIGISTX]

3 hours ago, TheDarkCanuck said:

What if you want to use your NAS to store ISOs and vm images?  

Whats the question exactly? That is exactly what I do... My NAS is a NAS, and services (like plex, but also many other things) use the SMB/NFS network shares as their /data locations. I just don't run the actual services ON the NAS, they run seperately. Plex runs in its own Ubuntu server VM next to my truenas VM for instance. 

[TheDarkCanuck]

14 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Whats the question exactly? That is exactly what I do... My NAS is a NAS, and services (like plex, but also many other things) use the SMB/NFS network shares as their /data locations. I just don't run the actual services ON the NAS, they run seperately. Plex runs in its own Ubuntu server VM next to my truenas VM for instance. 

I'm confused by these setups because it's not clear where you are storing the truenas vm images. In truenas itself? That can't be possible..  unless maybe you are passing disks from the proxmox host rather than the actual storage controller to the truenas guest? Which would result in degraded performance as you need to have guest and host communicating for every operation involving that storage. Or else your truenas vm image is dangling in some other storage device not passed to your nas? Which makes me feel unclean... maybe I'm missing something here.

[LIGISTX]

1 hour ago, TheDarkCanuck said:

I'm confused by these setups because it's not clear where you are storing the truenas vm images. In truenas itself? That can't be possible..  unless maybe you are passing disks from the proxmox host rather than the actual storage controller to the truenas guest? Which would result in degraded performance as you need to have guest and host communicating for every operation involving that storage. Or else your truenas vm image is dangling in some other storage device not passed to your nas? Which makes me feel unclean... maybe I'm missing something here.

Proxmox host runs on RAID 1 NVMe SDD’s, as do my VM’s. All VM’s run off the same nvme’s as the Proxmox boot devices. 
 

TrueNAS is a guest on Proxmox, with a PCIe HBA passed through so TrueNAS has block level access to all drives, it doesn’t “know” its virtualized…

 

All other VM’s that require data from truenas’s network shares reach out via SMB or NFS. Virtually of course, but a vNIC is just a NIC at the end of the day. 
 

I don’t know exactly what you mean by:

2 hours ago, TheDarkCanuck said:

storing the truenas vm images

Truenas, for me, as with most homelabs, is just being used as NAS. I am not booting VM’s from Truenas storage.

[TheDarkCanuck]

This is why I like to run the nas as a dedicated appliance without virtualization. Virtual machines are either passed a boot device (i.e. storage) directly, or they will virtualize that device in the form of an image (qcow is a common one for qemu). You can then store your proxmox guest images on the central storage device. Now you gain the benefits of redundancy and all that stuff baked into the network storage for your vms. It makes migration much simpler.

 

Anyway, there are many ways to skin a cat and I suppose your method works just as well! It's certainly not possible or preferable for everyone to have multiple machines like that. 

8 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

Truenas, for me, as with most homelabs, is just being used as NAS. I am not booting VM’s from Truenas storage.

Actually I would like to play around with ipxe as a total replacement for something like Ventoy, but not sure if that's possible. It's somewhere near the bottom of a very long list of to-dos.