Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

Are there any mini NAS with ECC ram nowadays? I recall that being my personal limiting factor

Yes, but not particularly cheap: https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=89

The Aoostar WTR max is pretty beefy, supports 5 nvme and 6 hard drives, and up to 128GB of ECC ram. But it’s $700 bare bones, much more than these devices in the article.

HP Microservers.

I got myself a gen8, they’re quite cheap. They do have ECC RAM and take 3.5” hard drives.

At some point though, SSDs will beat hard drives on total price (including electricity). I’d like a small and efficient ECC option for then.

One of the arm ones is yes. Can't for the life of me remember which though - sorry - either something in bananapi or lattepanda part of universe I think

Aoostar WTR series is one change away from being the PERFECT home server/nas. Passing the storage controller IOMMU to a VM is finicky at best. Still better than the vast majority of devices that don't allow it at all. But if they do that, I'm in homelab heaven. Unfortunately, the current iteration cannot due to a hardware limitation in the AMD chipset they're using.

Minisforum N5 Pro Nas has up to 96 GB of ECC RAM

https://www.minisforum.com/pages/n5_pro

https://store.minisforum.com/en-de/products/minisforum-n5-n5...

    no RAM 1.399€
  16GB RAM 1.459€
  48GB RAM 1.749€
  96GB RAM 2.119€

96GB DDR5 SO-DIMM costs around 200€ to 280€ in Germany.

https://geizhals.de/?cat=ramddr3&xf=15903_DDR5~15903_SO-DIMM...

I wonder if that 128GB kit would work, as the CPU supports up to 256GB

https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/laptop/ryzen-pro/...

I can't force the page to show USD prices.

Asustor has some cheaper options that support ECC. Though not as cheap as those in the OP article.

FLASHSTOR 6 Gen2 (FS6806X) $1000 - https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=90

LOCKERSTOR 4 Gen3 (AS6804T) $1300 - https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=86

Good info! Is it the same limitation on WTR pro and max? The max is an 8845hsv versus the 5825u in the pro.

Is this "full" ECC, or just the baseline improved ECC that all DDR5 has?

Either way, on my most recent NAS build, I didn't bother with a server-grade motherboard, figuring that the standard consumer DDR5 ECC was probably good enough.

The DDR5 on-die ECC doesn’t report memory errors back to the CPU, which is why you would normally want ECC RAM in the first place. Unlike traditional side-band ECC, it also doesn’t protect the memory transfers between CPU and RAM. DDR5 requires the on-die ECC in order to still remain reliable in face of its chip density and speed.

This is full ECC, the CPU supports it (AMD Pro variant).

DDR5 ECC is not good enough. What if you have faulty RAM and ECC is constantly correcting it without you knowing it? There's no value in that. You need the OS to be informed so that you are aware of it. It also does not protect errors which occur between the RAM and the CPU.

This is similar to HDDs using ECC. Without SMART you'd have a problem, but part of SMART is that it allows you to get a count of ECC-corrected errors so that you can be aware of the state of the drive.

True ECC takes the role of SMART in regards of RAM, it's just that it only reports that: ECC-corrected errors.

On a NAS, where you likely store important data, true ECC does add value.

Note the RAM list linked above doesn't show ECC SODIMM options.

Thank you. I thought I had it selected in the beginning, but no. The list then contains only one entry

https://geizhals.de/?cat=ramddr3&sort=r&xf=1454_49152%7E1590...

Kingston Server Premier SO-DIMM 48GB, DDR5-5600, CL46-45-45, ECC KSM56T46BD8KM-48HM for 250€

Which then means 500€ for the 96GB

I have the pro. I'm not sure if the Max will do passthrough but a quick google seems to indicate that it won't. (There's a discussion on the proxmox forum)

I'm still running my gen8 microserver - it was <200 GBP when I bought it something like 9 years ago, and I still haven't found anything worth replacing it with.

With modern HDDs I can however saturate the SATA controller, whilst it has 2x SATA 3 and 2x SATA 2, I can only achieve ~5-6 Gbps cumulative, not the 18Gbps you would expect. It's certainly not a disaster, but does mean writes especially are slower than expected (2x write amplification).