Ask HN: Do you use ECC RAM in your home/personal workstations?

After coming across this[0] thread yesterday I'm considering upgrading my RAM on my Ryzen 9 3900X workstation to ECC to protect myself from data integrity issues in the future.

Would you suggest this route? It seems to me that there's little reason to upgrade if there have been no issues in the past.

What have your experiences been with running your workstations with ECC ram? Is it worth the additional cost?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34470900

All 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.

I 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 calculate valid sha256 checksums when utilizing vector optimized implementations. Who knows how bad other hardware issues could be. You just wouldn’t know. I would pay a little extra for ECC memory given the choice.

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.

> 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 more effort involved in building an ECC-capable system, because ECC is a feature provided by the motherboard maker, rather than a feature guaranteed to be present as part of AMD's platform. As such, you need to verify that your motherboard actually supports it.

Also, ECC memory largely lacks memory auto-overclocking features like XMP, EXPO, or whatever AMD called it in the past. As such, the memory will default to conservative bandwidth and latency settings (rather than the faster settings typically offered on enthusiast RAM), and it will be on you to overclock it if you wish to do so.

(On the positive side, ECC memory also largely lacks the "heat spreaders" and other plastic/RGB bits found on enthusiast memory, which means it's more likely to fit properly underneath a tower-style CPU air cooler.)

Lastly, unbuffered ECC can be somewhat difficult to find at typical consumer electronics retailers, and you'll likely have better luck getting it from vendors that specialize in server memory.

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.