Would my setup benifit from a Xeon and ECC?

[cloud1771]

Ok so I am a Consumer PC/Laptop tech. So I know and understand the average consumer software and hardware issues. BUT, when it comes to servers, data transfers etc I am lost.

And I have a issue with one of my computers that has been driving me nuts since I built this "server" it is about 9yr old (I know its old which is why before I build a new one i am asking questions)

Basically about ever 6months - 1year I have data corruption on 1 or 2 hard drives. I normally do a chkdsk /f /r Drive: most of the time it will get the data accessible and ill move it to another drive and run tests on the "bad drive" and no issues are found. I replace them anyways and use the old drive for non-critical stuff.

 

Let me explain my current setup.

It is an AMD Athlon II X4 635 2.9ghz in a gigabyte motherboard

12gb DDR3 ram

1 hard drive for OS and Programs

6 Data hard drives totaling 13TB

It is currently running windows 10 with no issues at all

I have had this issue with linux, win7, and win8.1

 

Simply put I call it my "mediaserver"

It had Plex, subsonic, PlayOn, and Crashplan for local backup of photos and music can easily handle steaming to 4-6 device at a time.

it use to also handle Sickbeard, couchpotato, headphones(to sort not download wife has 1000's of cds I rip), duluge, and sabnzbd

 

Last crash i had i though well maybe its overwhelmed by all the data flow.

So I took a old laptop and made a "DownloadServer"

This server now hosts Sickbeard, couchpotato, headphones, duluge, and sabnzbd

 

And 9mo no and only had one minor issue when i was re ripping all my Music CD's again I had to do a chkdsk and keep going.

 

Would this setup benefit from a Xeon and ECC meomory?

I was thinking of watching ebay for decently priced Xeons, and Motherboard.

 

I would also love to have it replace my gaming system aswell (i only play FF14 and JRPGs for the most part) (AMD FX-8320)

I saw the video about gaming over uRaid and though about making it where I could use a laptop in the living room to play my games.

 

I know its alot, if you need any clarification please let me know

Thanks in advance

Matt

[Enderman]

Your issue is probably your motherboard or raid card or whatever handles your storage.

This isn't an ECC issue if you have the problem so often and through so many OSes.

If you want to upgrade to a xeon then sure, it will be a great performance improvement, but the extra money for ECC is probably not worth it.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Probably Not. 

 

Normally drive failure is completely independent of the rest of the system. 

 

Your probabaly using old unreliabe drives or a unreliable system. You can check drives with badblocks on linux of chkdisk /b.

[Mark77]

Its been my experience over the years that most crashes that cause actual bad stuff to happen in Windows are caused by the video drivers or video card.  Not by the RAM.

 

The lack of ECC RAM generally would leave you more susceptible to single bit errors.  chkdsk or the traditional Windows tools wouldn't detect these. 

 

So my view is that, no, merely moving to ECC won't help you.  But moving to a new platform with very stable video should help you significantly.  Windows unfortunately eschewed the full protection of the x86 architecture by allowing video drivers to run in priviledged rings, and that has created a lot of trouble over the years, even on servers.

[cloud1771]

At the moment its not linux I had a hard time recovering data.

to test the drives after replacing them I ran a "darik's boot and nuke" to Zero them out with i think it was 9 passes no errors

I also ran the tests from the the MFG of the drive WesterDigital or Seagate