I hate this headline and wince every time I see it, even the article quotes<p>> There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than
any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS.<p>And goes on to say<p>> I have nothing to substantiate this, but my thinking is that since ZFS is a way more advanced and complex file system, it may be more susceptible to the adverse effects of bad memory, compared to legacy file systems.
I have to disagree with this guy.<p>Sure, the corruption can occur, but if the memory is not faulty, ZFS will detect data corruption in-situ during a scrub. It's just that ECC errors can introduce their own corruption that is separate, during write operations only.<p>I believe if you have no choice but to use non-ECC (e.g. existing hardware that is limited by Intel's stupid design choice of "ECC is only for servers"), ZFS is still much better than using ext4. It still protects against a different class of errors which is HDD degradation. When used in RAID-Z it can even recover for them.<p>For perfect protection ECC is necessary. But this is not always possible financially. I think it's a bit of a wild statement to say that if you can't afford a server with ECC you should forget about ZFS entirely.
Sounds like the article should have been titled, "Why you shouldn't use ZFS".<p><pre><code> ZFS does not have such [recovery] tools, if the pool is corrupt, all data must
be considered lost, there is no option for recovery.
</code></pre>
In other words, this marvelous piece of over engineered technology is fragile. When it works, it's great. When it fails, it's a complete disaster.<p>Everything fails eventually. How do you prefer your failure served? In small manageable increments or one spectacular, complete, overwhelming, unrecoverable helping.
I have 10 SATA HDDs (14-18TB each). I would like to build a TrueNAS box with ECC memory on a budget of less than $700 (used hardware is perfectly fine).<p>Any recommendations for what to look on ebay?
Please always use ECC because your Filesystem-cache (for example xfs) is the same as your ARC (on ZFS)...it's really the same.<p>But you can activate Arc check-summing at least.<p>That's a better article:<p><a href="https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-your-data/" rel="nofollow">https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-y...</a>
Ddr5 has some form of built in ecc. Finally bringing it by default to the masses<p>Edit: sorry, this is misleading. See below or ignore. Ddr5 "ecc" that I am referring to is not the same as what one would think when saying ecc normally