I wish everything had ECC, but sadly it does not. I do, however, have code on Pi based servers to allocate a few MB of random size every once in a while, give it a random value, and check it in a bit, to catch the worst always present errors. I've never seen it catch anything though, and would be very surprised if it did.
Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?
21–28 of 28 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?
#22All of the machines in my home lab do but sadly none of my workstations do (ThinkCentre and a ThinkPad.) I wish they did. Some higher end Dell Precision's and at least at one time Lenovo/Thinkpads had models with ECC ram and if they still do next time I need a new machine that's what I'm getting.
> they still do Yes, they still do. Dell Precision 5XXX and 7XXX models come with ECC support. I own a a Precision 7560 with a Xeon W-11955M, Quadro A5000, and 2×16 GB of 3200 MHz ECC DDR4. The problem is that Dell Precisions are very costly compared to 'normal' gaming laptops. But on the bright side, they come with business-class support, including a 24/7 hotline, and next-business-day on site service.
Yeah, last time I looked the cost was the primary barrier and decided to wait until I needed an upgrade. I don't do any PC gaming so I can save a bit my going with the Intel GPU instead of a discrete graphics card.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?
#23I don’t think it’s worth paying a premium as long as you regularly checksum important data and look for changes over time, keep redundant backups, and regularly check for integrity failures. You should see the inconsistencies as an early warning sign. Just don’t set up your workflows so it’s too late by the time you see them. That said, I’ve seen a not insignificant number of computers in the wild that couldn’t calcu…
> In fact, I have two Dell Precision T7810 workstations at home with 144 GB of ECC memory and dual Xeons totaling 36 cores on each machine as my two primary personal computers.
What are you doing that demands this level of equipment?
Re: Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?
#24I 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…
> 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.
This server likely had a setting enabled to perform a full test of the memory on boot.
I'm not sure why server vendors do this (I've never once in my career seen that test catch anything), but the boot times have nothing to do with ECC. My Ryzen 9 3900X-powered PC with 64 GB of ECC boots in a few seconds.
> 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.
Without the ability to detect errors, how do you know it's good enough?
Re: Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?
#25I don’t think it’s worth paying a premium as long as you regularly checksum important data and look for changes over time, keep redundant backups, and regularly check for integrity failures. You should see the inconsistencies as an early warning sign. Just don’t set up your workflows so it’s too late by the time you see them. That said, I’ve seen a not insignificant number of computers in the wild that couldn’t calcu…
> In fact, I have two Dell Precision T7810 workstations at home with 144 GB of ECC memory and dual Xeons totaling 36 cores on each machine as my two primary personal computers. What are you doing that demands this level of equipment?
DevOps and hosting side projects initially. I never approached full utilization (CPU or memory) with either one as a home server, so now I have a third Precision 7810T with 32 cores (dual Xeon E5-2698 v3 processors) and 32GB of memory that hosts all my side project infrastructure at home (in addition to my website).
Lately I've been doing distributed computing, machine learning, and cybersecurity side projects with them. I can run a variety of environments and tools while still using them to game or for everyday computer tasks (running several multi-core VMs is no problem with this kind of hardware).
Re: Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?
#26I 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…
> 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. This server likely had a setting enabled to perform a full test of the memory on boot. I'm not sure why server vendors do this (I've never once in my career…
Server BIOS is just very poorly written. It never gets the boot time optimizations that desktops get.
At a former employer, every time we got a new generation of Intel dual socket server boards, the bugs that we had to get fixed in the previous generation would always reappear. Specifically, there were issues with the board properly detecting and configuring PCIe gen 1 boards. One of the custom boards used an older FPGA and only used gen 1 speeds. Intel would eventually get the BIOS fixed about 6 months after the first test systems would arrive. I saw this happen in no fewer than 3 distinct generations of server boards. It's bonkers how broken their processes are. My best guess is that the code for the next generation of CPU always branches off before the bug fixes are reapplied.
Sometimes I hate computers.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?
#27> 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.
> My impression was that you could expect extremely little OC to be stable even if you did it yourself.
Not my experience at all. I bought a Ryzen 3700X with 4x 16GB 2666MT/s Kingston ECC. Memory chips turned out to be Micron revision E, same as used in many popular Gaming XMP sticks.
I could run these at 3333MT/s and lower CL from 19 to 14. Thus, raw latency going from 19*2000/2666=14.2ns to 8.4ns. After recently buying a used Ryzen 5950X I can now push the memory to 3600CL14, or 7.77ns. At this point I'm at the limit of what I can cool without starting to hear my PC.
> What I could find was _very_ slow and something like twice the price.
And at this point I'm running my memory at the same speed as G.Skill Ripjaws V Black, which is the fastest gaming memory I could find available here, but the G.Skill is twice the cost. Though, I see that it's also available as 4600CL19, and I actually never tried decoupling the memory clock from the fabric clock after upgrading my CPU since I couldn't push 4 sticks fast enough on my 3700x that I'd make up for the decoupling. I should probably try it out. Suspect I won't hit 4600MT/s though, but I don't think I would be able to run the G.Skill att 4600CL19 with 4 sticks either.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?
#28I 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…
> Not sure if its an AMD thing but my friend booted his EPYC server with 256GB of DDR4 ECC RAM for half an hour.
That could be a memory training issue. Using 256GB listed as compatible with the Supermicro motherboard my EPYC server boots in a minute or so. If i configure my workstation memory with weird timings it can take a while for the motherboard to figure out the remaining Auto-timings, possibly adding 4-5 minutes to the boot procedure.
> Speed and work throughput is of utmost importance so ECC I'd say is okay to be sacrificed.
But you don't have to, see my other post in the thread regarding my workstation memory.