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Non-ECC memory corrupted my hard drive image [video]

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Re: Non-ECC memory corrupted my hard drive image [video]

#61

Post by kevingadd »

newZWhoDis wrote: post #30
kevingadd wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went out of my way for ECC because losing files can mean losing days of work. With how much a sweng gets paid it's worth the ECC premium if it saves me a few days of work over the life of the machine. Recently I discovered that one of my SSDs was quietly failing without setting off any warnings; doing a chkdsk showed that some files had already gotten corrupted. One of them was my backblaze backup index! Even thoug…

My favorite is when data silently corrupts, and then is happily propagated to your off-site recovery :/

Yeah, I don't know when the drive started failing, so in practice my backups are probably all screwed too. My only option would be to get a spare drive, restore a backup to it, then do a block level diff of the current and backup volumes and try to figure out whether any of the differences are file corruption.

Re: Non-ECC memory corrupted my hard drive image [video]

#63

Post by simoncion »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #49
eternityforest wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised nobody has made RAM with the ECC logic built into the ram itself, that just looks like normal ram to the CPU.

It is called DDR5 - it has ECC built in the module itself. Making such a module does not make much sense if you cannot report the rate of errors, so if it is just hiding you have a bad RAM stick there is only so much value in having ECC.

It is my understanding that the ECC that you're talking about only protects data-in-flight between the module and whatever is reading or writing the data. It does not protect against corruption of data-at-rest, which is what is protected with ECC in DDR4 and older.

It's also my understanding that the DDR5 data-in-flight ECC is a mandatory feature because the link between the memory modules and everything else is so error-prone that the system would simply not function without it.

Re: Non-ECC memory corrupted my hard drive image [video]

#65

Post by simoncion »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #6
TacticalCoder wrote: post #2

> Why ECC Memory Is So Important Except that it's not for many use cases. It's great for servers but for people on their personal and/or work computer, it's simply not that useful. Seriously: which percentage of developers have ECC on their development machine(s)? As developers we live in a world of SSH, cryptographic hashes, checksums everywhere, Git repositories (that is a big one), Merkle trees, digital signatures…

> which percentage of developers have ECC on their development machine(s)? That question won't help you evaluate the demand for ECC simply because the supply is strangled. Those who want it have to make compromises to get ECC: get a Xeon, or get one of few AMD motherboards with matching CPUs and overpriced RAM without a guarantee that it will end up working.

> ...get one of few AMD motherboards with matching CPUs and overpriced RAM...

I mean, if you want a _guarantee_, then sure, get one of those certified-for-ECC motherboards.

But, like, as far as I know, going _at least_ far back as the Phenom II (released in 2008) AMD desktop processors have always supported ECC RAM. And -as far as I know- ASUS motherboards for said processors have always supported dropping in ECC RAM (and Linux and memtest and friends have always agreed that ECC was enabled and functioning in such a system).

Source: Personal experience with Phenom II, Threadripper, and Ryzen 5 CPUs and ASUS motherboards, and looking-from-a-distance at the rest of the AMD CPUs between the Phenom and the Ryzen 5.

Re: Non-ECC memory corrupted my hard drive image [video]

#66

Post by aborsy »

ksec wrote: post #26

This is especially true for NAS. And why you need BTRFS or preferably ZFS. Unfortunately none of the consumer NAS offers ZFS, and BTRFS is still not a default option. Neither Synology or Qnap seems to care.

Synology offers ECC in 2023 consumer modes such as 923.

Still the experience that synology btrfs provides is nowhere as good as ZFS (due to a lot of limitations).

Re: Non-ECC memory corrupted my hard drive image [video]

#67

Post by simoncion »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #33

I watched the full video. It was long but very informative. The humor at times made up for the length and the presenter showed a lot of deep knowledge that most people won't have. My biggest gripe is that they just didn't try replacing the RAM sticks in the first place. I get that they wanted to do a root cause analysis, but geez the time and patience they had to do all those memory tests. No wonder they did a video…

> ...but try finding some high performance 16GB sticks of ECC DDR4 RAM like what you'll see on gaming computers.

Here ya go:

https://nemixram.com/16gb-ddr4-3200-pc4-25600-ecc-udimm-2rx8...

It doesn't have pretty lights on it, but it does seem to be in the same speed class that gets called "gaming RAM" by a _whole_ bunch of retailers.

Re: Non-ECC memory corrupted my hard drive image [video]

#69

Post by digitallyfree »

craftkiller wrote: post #5
TacticalCoder wrote: post #2

> Why ECC Memory Is So Important Except that it's not for many use cases. It's great for servers but for people on their personal and/or work computer, it's simply not that useful. Seriously: which percentage of developers have ECC on their development machine(s)? As developers we live in a world of SSH, cryptographic hashes, checksums everywhere, Git repositories (that is a big one), Merkle trees, digital signatures…

> Seriously: which percentage of developers have ECC on their development machine(s)? Every single one of my non-mini computers uses ECC ram except for my laptop. If someone would release a framework laptop motherboard that supports ECC ram (and preferably risc-v) I'd finally be able to close to reliability gap. It blows my mind that we say "Well sure, we COULD make infallible ram, but that would cost a tiny bit extr…

I develop on VMs on my server (with ECC and RAIDZ) which i access using SSH or VDI protocols. I would love to have ECC on all my machines but that isn't feasible until the status quo changes, so I stick with the remote approach. To me that's an acceptable tradeoff as the non-ECC desktops/laptops are just used as dumb terminals while the real work happens on the reliable server.

I can't speak for ECC at the moment but ZFS has definitely saved me from data corruption that would have been left to manifset otherwise.

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