91–100 of 146 posts
Latest Intel desktop CPUs (i.e. i9-13900KF) supports ECC with the W680 chipset.
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I wish those motherboards didn't cost $450+, I've contemplated building a home server with a 13th gen + ECC because you also get quicksync onboard.
Exactly. $450 for a motherboard just to get ECC support is ridiculous. I don't know how it is with AM5, but on AM4, my understanding is that you could use ECC memory with many normally-priced motherboards. (Even if it wasn't "officially" supported.) Mentioning W680 feels pointless. You've always been able to buy high-end workstation-class motherboards and stick ECC in them. The entire point of the article is that all…
If you just /want/ ECC, then yes $450 bucks is expensive. You don't /need/ it, though, so this is neither here nor there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. $450 for a motherboard just to get ECC support is ridiculous. I don't know how it is with AM5, but on AM4, my understanding is that you could use ECC memory with many normally-priced motherboards. (Even if it wasn't "officially" supported.) Mentioning W680 feels pointless. You've always been able to buy high-end workstation-class motherboards and stick ECC in them. The entire point of the article is that all…
If you sincerely /need/ ECC, any amount of money is of no concern because you need it. It's just a cost of doing business, as accountants might say. If you just /want/ ECC, then yes $450 bucks is expensive. You don't /need/ it, though, so this is neither here nor there.
The whole point of this article and discussion says otherwise. Don't come to me to complain about that. Your comment should be a top-level comment complaining at the author.
I fully agree with the author that ECC should not be reserved for expensive computers, of course, but I'm just here to point out that W680 is not a response to the author's concerns at all, period. W680 is a continuation of Intel's status quo.
Also, you can use asterisks to create italics.
> a multitude of bit flip errors ECC can only report >1 bit flip per word. It can't correct it. If your memory is going bad, the chance of multiple bit failure is going to be much higher than the stray bit flip from other causes (mind you, I have 32GB ECC running right now and have seen zero bit flips over 1.5 years). I'm not arguing against ECC. I have it and run it myself. But this blog post is an argument for ZFS…
It's completely possible for a single DRAM cell to go bad permanently.
> But this blog post is an argument for ZFS
ZFS won't save you if what you tell it to put into a file is wrong. And I think that corrupting ZFS' own in-RAM data structures voids your ZFS warranty.
> and regular backups.
Of course you should have regular backups. But do you really feel like spending hours restoring from a backup (and then maybe weeks finding things you didn't restore)? Do you feel like trying to guess how far back you have to go to get to a good backup of a corrupted file? Do you want to lose whatever new work got corrupted between the time your memory failed and the time you finally noticed it?
OP's machine was corrupting data for weeks. You can't just roll all your work back to several weeks ago. Most of us can't, anyway.
You need backups and ECC.
> I had a drive that had corruption and I thought went bad. Turns out, bad SATA cable.
If a bad cable did that, something wasn't doing SATA CRC checking the way it was supposed to (or wasn't reacting to detected CRC errors the way it should have). Similar in spirit to ECC checking for memory.
> My speeds were not at all what I expected. Turns out... bad ethernet cable.
It probably got slow because of retransmissions. If there hadn't been CRCs on both the Ethernet layer and higher layers, it could possibly have just silently corrupted your data.
You need to cover as much of a computer system as you can with error detection and correction, or you always lose. Even one big failure in a lifetime can pay for a lot of ECC RAM.
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And AMD, and Nvidia.
AMD ryzen CPUs have ECC support, but it varies by motherboard. My home NAS runs a Ryzen in an ASrock Rack motherboard with ECC ram. I never did figure out a way to verify that the ECC is working/if it is able to report errors (to the kernel?). It was also a bit hard finding the right ram, but there’s a brand called Nemix that I found. I was a bit sketched out by the brand, but the chips themselves were Micron.
Not all of them, afaik the am4 processors with graphics don't unless you have a pro branded version.
> I never did figure out a way to verify that the ECC is working/if it is able to report errors (to the kernel?
The easiest way is to induce an error. Some of the memtest tools try? But also, you can tweak memory voltage and timing to make things less reliable, and you should be able to get errors and error reporting as a result.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AMD ryzen CPUs have ECC support, but it varies by motherboard. My home NAS runs a Ryzen in an ASrock Rack motherboard with ECC ram. I never did figure out a way to verify that the ECC is working/if it is able to report errors (to the kernel?). It was also a bit hard finding the right ram, but there’s a brand called Nemix that I found. I was a bit sketched out by the brand, but the chips themselves were Micron.
> AMD ryzen CPUs have ECC support Not all of them, afaik the am4 processors with graphics don't unless you have a pro branded version. > I never did figure out a way to verify that the ECC is working/if it is able to report errors (to the kernel? The easiest way is to induce an error. Some of the memtest tools try? But also, you can tweak memory voltage and timing to make things less reliable, and you should be able…
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Real world numbers are closer to 1 bitflip/GB/hour than year because bit flips are highly correlated. “A large-scale study based on Google's very large number of servers was presented at the SIGMETRICS/Performance '09 conference.[6] The actual error rate found was several orders of magnitude higher than the previous small-scale or laboratory studies, with between 25,000 (2.5 × 10−11 error/bit·h) and 70,000 (7.0 × 10−…
That study is very old and is based on long-outdated DRAM tech. I suspect that DDR5 has much lower error rates.
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> AMD ryzen CPUs have ECC support Not all of them, afaik the am4 processors with graphics don't unless you have a pro branded version. > I never did figure out a way to verify that the ECC is working/if it is able to report errors (to the kernel? The easiest way is to induce an error. Some of the memtest tools try? But also, you can tweak memory voltage and timing to make things less reliable, and you should be able…
I think the question is where are the errors reported? Would you see logs in dmesg for example? Or is there some smartctl-like tool that exposes the raw correction counters?
I believe that is is a right. Every machine I've built in the last ~12 years had had ECC. Nobody is trying to take that ability away from me. I treat my machine as a "workstation". I run several VMs. I keep my machines for a few years. I clean the filters periodically. Do game machines need ECC? I'd say no. They are optimized for cost-performance. The worse that can happen with a memory error is a lost game.
You have the good fortune of being able to afford lots of expensive hardware. Mandating ECC is basically like mandating seat-belts in all cars: it makes safety cheaper for everyone through the economies of scale. Gamers and libertarians could theoretically disable it if they so chose and the total cost to them would only be a few pennies for the wasted motherboard circuitry.
ECC memory isn't that much more expensive. I was fortunate to build my current machine a few months before memory prices doubled. Previous generation Xeon CPUs aren't very expensive. Same with motherboards. And another option is to just buy a used server. These are super cheap now as so many companies are moving to cloud computing.
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I wish those motherboards didn't cost $450+, I've contemplated building a home server with a 13th gen + ECC because you also get quicksync onboard.
I believe AMD APUs also have decent hardware acceleration like quicksync, for example available through VAAPI.