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Havoc ◴[] No.44465831[source]
I've been running one of these quad nvme mini-NAS for a while. They're a good compromise if you can live with no ECC. With some DIY shenanigans they can even run fanless

If you're running on consumer nvmes then mirrored is probably a better idea than raidz though. Write amplification can easily shred consumer drives.

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turnsout ◴[] No.44466452[source]
I’m a TrueNAS/FreeNAS user, currently running an ECC system. The traditional wisdom is that ECC is a must-have for ZFS. What do you think? Is this outdated?
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1. magicalhippo ◴[] No.44466924[source]
Been running without for 15+ on my NAS boxes, built using my previous desktop hardware fitted with NAS disks.

They're on 24/ and run monthly scrubs, as well as monthly checksum verification of my backup images, and not noticed any issues so far.

I had some correctable errors which got fixed when changing SATA cable a few times, and some from a disk that after 7 years of 24/7 developed a small run of bad sectors.

That said, you got ECC so you should be able to monitor corrected memory errors.

Matt Ahrens himself (one of the creators of ZFS) had said there's nothing particular about ZFS:

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. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag (zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the window of vulnerability from a memory error.

I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS.

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1235679&p=...