If you can afford it, sure. That's one reason why I'm so happy Ryzen supports it on consumer processors: It makes ECC cheap.
Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)
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Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)
#12Yes. Bit errors are uncommon and range from benign to crash. Your storage has them, memory has them, network has them. Non error correcting memory very significantly increases risk. And this is the kind of risk you don't notice, until you do and when you do, it's often subtle, insidious, impossible to track down. Servers absolutely. It's debatable on desktop, but we have huge RAM now. Might as well error correct. The…
I wouldn't bother on a desktop or laptop. Servers absolutely.
Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)
#13Depends on what you are doing. ZFS storage servers: Hell yes High-value data in my DB? Hell yes email server: Nope super cool gaming rig: Nope * Cluster: Hell yes General office workstation: maybe. I don't have the budget for 20 redundant copies. I do have the budget for slightly more expensive RAM. Especially on my ZFS storage arrays. ECC memory is like Insurance. You hope you never need it. One real downside that I…
There is a hidden cost of ECC with regards to the chipset. None of the cheap chipsets support it, so on any home build, it's going to be expensive.
Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)
#14[deleted]
Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)
#15Altitude also plays a factor in random memory corruption.
From the wikipedia article on ECC Ram, "Hence, the error rates increase rapidly with rising altitude; for example, compared to the sea level, the rate of neutron flux is 3.5 times higher at 1.5 km and 300 times higher at 10–12 km (the cruising altitude of commercial airplanes).[3] As a result, systems operating at high altitudes require special provision for reliability."
Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)
#16" Fri, 27 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000 " Needs (2015) added to the Title I think.
Thanks! Updated.
Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)
#17Depends on what you are doing. ZFS storage servers: Hell yes High-value data in my DB? Hell yes email server: Nope super cool gaming rig: Nope * Cluster: Hell yes General office workstation: maybe. I don't have the budget for 20 redundant copies. I do have the budget for slightly more expensive RAM. Especially on my ZFS storage arrays. ECC memory is like Insurance. You hope you never need it. One real downside that I…
There is a hidden cost of ECC with regards to the chipset. None of the cheap chipsets support it, so on any home build, it's going to be expensive.
Not true with Ryzen, as long as you find unregistered ECC acceptable.
Somewhat not true with Intel, as some of the lower end Xeons now support it.
Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)
#18Depends on what you are doing. ZFS storage servers: Hell yes High-value data in my DB? Hell yes email server: Nope super cool gaming rig: Nope * Cluster: Hell yes General office workstation: maybe. I don't have the budget for 20 redundant copies. I do have the budget for slightly more expensive RAM. Especially on my ZFS storage arrays. ECC memory is like Insurance. You hope you never need it. One real downside that I…
There is a hidden cost of ECC with regards to the chipset. None of the cheap chipsets support it, so on any home build, it's going to be expensive.
Fortunately the new AMD Ryzen processors support ECC in the memory controller, unfortunately none of the boards seem to be testing/certifying it yet and the UEFI on a lot of the boards is a mess right now.
Hopefully more consumer boards support/certify it since it is already there on the memory controller.
Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)
#19Depends on what you are doing. ZFS storage servers: Hell yes High-value data in my DB? Hell yes email server: Nope super cool gaming rig: Nope * Cluster: Hell yes General office workstation: maybe. I don't have the budget for 20 redundant copies. I do have the budget for slightly more expensive RAM. Especially on my ZFS storage arrays. ECC memory is like Insurance. You hope you never need it. One real downside that I…
I agree on gaming, but e-mail often contains important information that I wouldn't want to suffer from random corruption.
Re: Should I buy ECC memory? (2015)
#20A better question is why /shouldn't/ you use ECC memory?
Generally the answer to this is any context where you legitimately do NOT care about your data at all, but you still care about costs. This predominately devolves in to consumption only gaming systems.
In all other cases everyone would be better served (in the long run) by buying ECC RAM.