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Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?
11–20 of 28 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?
#12I'm not sure that you can upgrade to ECC: https://community.amd.com/t5/processors/problems-with-my-ryz... ECC is usually reserved for high-end CPUs like ThreadRipper/EPYC.
Ryzen desktop CPUs support ECC as long as the motherboard supports it. What it doesn't support is registered (including load-reduced) DIMMs, which is the most commonly available type of server memory. Unbuffered ECC DIMMs only.
Unless you get yourself a “desktop” Ryzen that is just a rebranded APU with graphics parts shutoff, e.g Ryzen 5500.
Admittedly, AMD does list ECC as unsupported on that one, but most motherboard vendors will only warn you about APUs not supporting ECC RAM.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?
#13It all depends on what each machine is doing and whether you care to pay the premium (and it is a premium unfortunately).
On my personal machine I like to live dangerously - it is running RAID0 and has non-ECC RAM - because everything is reproducible and I'm happy to rebuild it periodically.
On my home NAS, I do the complete opposite (running RAID1, ZFS and have ECC RAM), because it is the primary data store for things I care about.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?
#14I have only used ECC memory with IBM Power and HP PA-RISC & Itanium systems in cluster configurations. Typically ECC errors only started appearing when one or more fans stopped working. Generally, other system and application errors lead to fail-overs being triggered.
For personal use, I can't justify the increased mobo + RAM costs for a minimal improvement in reliability. RAID for magnetic drives and UPS are better investments for increased reliability.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?
#15> It seems to me that there's little reason to upgrade [to ECC RAM] if there have been no issues in the past. One of the benefits of ECC RAM is the ability to detect single and double-bit memory errors. In the absence of that capability, how would you know if you have a problem with your RAM? > What have your experiences been with running your workstations with ECC ram. For AMD desktop processors, there is a little m…
When built my last machine, I looked pretty hard for ECC RAM. What I could find was _very_ slow and something like twice the price. Do you have any suggestions at all for where to look? Also, is it really just lack of XMP and having to OC manually? My impression was that you could expect extremely little OC to be stable even if you did it yourself.
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Re: Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?
#16> It seems to me that there's little reason to upgrade [to ECC RAM] if there have been no issues in the past. One of the benefits of ECC RAM is the ability to detect single and double-bit memory errors. In the absence of that capability, how would you know if you have a problem with your RAM? > What have your experiences been with running your workstations with ECC ram. For AMD desktop processors, there is a little m…
When built my last machine, I looked pretty hard for ECC RAM. What I could find was _very_ slow and something like twice the price. Do you have any suggestions at all for where to look? Also, is it really just lack of XMP and having to OC manually? My impression was that you could expect extremely little OC to be stable even if you did it yourself.
> Do you have any suggestions at all for where to look?
I've bought from Memory4Less in the past and had a good experience. ServerSupply was also a source I used for work, although I don't think I've ever bought anything from them for personal use.
> Also, is it really just lack of XMP and having to OC manually?
Yes.
> My impression was that you could expect extremely little OC to be stable even if you did it yourself.
All other things being equal, I would expect ECC RAM to have somewhat lower overclocking headroom than non-ECC memory, because the memory controller has to drive an additional memory chip with a wider memory bus. However, I generally wouldn't expect significantly worse results than the manual overclocking that enthusiasts did in the past. Obviously, as with any overclocking, your mileage may vary.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?
#17I don't. In fact we shouldn't have. ECC RAM is supposed to be serving services that requires extremely high RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability). Any normal DDR4 RAM out here is already having a good enough RAS for a relatively long time.
As an anecdotal reference, my home "NAS" few weeks ago is running only with 16GB of cheap ADATA DDR4 2666MHz RAM ran for half a year non-stop, and I didn't even see a single RAS event in dmesg. It could be survivorship bias though.
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For a typical home/personal workstations we normally run stuffs that is burst period (i.e. used during 9 to 6 and some high usage in 2-3 hours). It is also okay to shrug a few bitrots or even tolerate a system crash like if the butterfly effect hits.
So another reason I don't use ECC RAM on workstations: Remember that ECC RAM is notoriously long to do memory initialization and memory training.
Not sure if its an AMD thing but my friend booted his EPYC server with 256GB of DDR4 ECC RAM for half an hour.
You are using a "work station" so getting the work done as quickly as possible is more important than having a system too safe and reliable. Speed and work throughput is of utmost importance so ECC I'd say is okay to be sacrificed.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?
#18Yes since 12 years. Use ECC whenever you can.
>What have your experiences been with running your workstations with ECC ram?
Correctable bit-flips.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?
#19It used to be the case, when RAM were less reliable, that all workstation ram was ECC, it fell out of favor due to cost and performance priorities.
However, as both software complexity and ram availability increase, the likelihood of memory corruption increase as well, even with memory reliability being quite high.
I don't run ECC on my gaming computer, (I also run its hard-drives in raid0, I care about performance, capacity and cost-effectiveness).
I do run ECC on my file storage (zfs server) and on my workstation. It might not be strictly needed on my workstation, but I just don't want to think about it, and it's just another parameter towards more reliability.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?
#20No, the performance per penny penalty is not worth it in the slightest for a workstation.