[VA3FXP]

Depends on what you are doing. ZFS storage servers: Hell yes High-value data in my DB? Hell yes email server: Nope super cool gaming rig: Nope * Cluster: Hell yes

General office workstation: maybe.

I don't have the budget for 20 redundant copies. I do have the budget for slightly more expensive RAM. Especially on my ZFS storage arrays.

ECC memory is like Insurance. You hope you never need it. One real downside that I have found, is finding out _when_ that memory correction has saved your ass. RAID arrays can alert you when a disk is dead. SMART mostly tells you when disks are failing. I haven't found a reliable tool to notify me when I am getting ECC errors/corrections.

[mikeash]

I agree on gaming, but e-mail often contains important information that I wouldn't want to suffer from random corruption.

[muro]

I don't understand why anyone would run their own email server. Cloud offerings work so well and are cheap.

[jacquesm]

Maybe they are under contract not to pass information to third parties or maybe the company policy is to not let internal email off the network.

That you don't understand it is likely from the perspective of an individual, possibly a private user. For those applications you can't beat the cloud. For business use every business needs to weigh their own needs.

Even then though, many business think they need to have their own server when they really don't and vice-versa.

[muro]

Sure, but those are rare and usually include enough budget to include sysadmins and definitely enough to buy ECC memory. For anyone weighing whether ECC is worth it, they are wasting time managing their email server.

[jacquesm]

Those are not rare at all. Every lawyers office has this problem, every journalist, every banker, every insurance company, every notary public, every administration and so on.

[pvg]

Most of these are not contractually obliged to run their own email servers so whatever problem they have, it's not that specific one.

[Taek]

If you are using the cloud for email they can usually see all of your activity. Email is also how you typically reset passwords. It can expose corporate secrets.

In practice, nobody encrypts their email. And even if they do, the cloud still gets all the metadata.

Running your own trades the above issues for other issues, but depending on your priorities and fears it might be worth doing.

[raarts]

> in practice nobody encrypts their email.

I work in the defence industry. All attachments must be encrypted. Also, all customer data must be stored in the same country.

[brongondwana]

Cloud offering here: we run ECC memory on all our servers, natch. It's not turtles quite all the way down.

[rocky1138]

> cheap

Hard to beat free. Couple this with the fact that I learn something by setting it up makes this a win for me.

[amenod]

NSA agrees with you, for one.

[throwa38282]

NSA is not the primary threat here. More conventional legal mechanisms are. Home serving is just as vulnerable to the NSA.

[thraway2016]

Conventional legal mechanisms against your home server cabinet can be handled via full disk encryption and a reed switch on your cabinet door connected to your power strip.

[tscs37]

Sounds fun until you have to open your cabinet door for legit reasons like swapping a faulty hard drive in your RAID array.

[toast0]

You should be getting MCA (machine check architecture?) notifications in syslog/dmesg if there are ECC correctable errors, and an MCE (machine check exception) on the console for uncorrectable error, based on my experience with SuperMicro xeon servers running FreeBSD. A lot of our servers see a few correctable errors once in a while, and it doesn't affect the usability of the system; but sometimes the number of correctable errors is very high and the system is very sluggish.

[VA3FXP]

Thanks!

[rocqua]

There is a hidden cost of ECC with regards to the chipset. None of the cheap chipsets support it, so on any home build, it's going to be expensive.

[eightysixfour]

Fortunately the new AMD Ryzen processors support ECC in the memory controller, unfortunately none of the boards seem to be testing/certifying it yet and the UEFI on a lot of the boards is a mess right now.

Hopefully more consumer boards support/certify it since it is already there on the memory controller.

[rlonstein]

The Asrock 370 boards officially support ECC, though I've read that various BIOS/UEFI versions don't: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/655e7v/all_asrock_am4_... People are reporting that the Asrock 350 boards do too. Gigabyte lists some ECC modules on the compatibility list but some report that it isn't working right.

[eightysixfour]

Good to know, I'm waiting for all of these boards to UEFI stuff to stabilize before I go shopping. Seems a bit messy right now.

[binarycrusader]

Not true with Ryzen, as long as you find unregistered ECC acceptable.

Somewhat not true with Intel, as some of the lower end Xeons now support it.

[paulmd]

Ryzen ECC support is a mess, no AM4 motherboard currently on the market has implemented ECC support fully and properly (not even Asrock). It's better than nothing but you would be a fool to rely on it.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-review...

"Kinda sorta works but the manufacturer won't stand behind it" is bunch of bullshit. If your data is worth using ECC in the first place - it's worth using a platform that has fully-implemented support, that has passed validation, that you know is going to work properly when you need it.

Until that happens - this is an application where Ryzen is simply not appropriate.

All of the modern i3s and Pentiums support ECC, but you do need the server chipset instead of the cheap consumer stuff. Good news though - those "expensive server boards" are roughly the same price as say, an AM4 motherboard with an X370 chipset.

Heck, you can buy a basic off-lease ThinkServer TS140 for only about $300. You'll only have about 4 GB of RAM but it's a shell to start building out (which is cheaper than having an OEM assemble it for you anyway).

[binarycrusader]

Ryzen ECC support is a mess, no AM4 motherboard currently on the market has implemented ECC support fully and properly (not even Asrock). It's better than nothing but you would be a fool to rely on it.

Ryzen motherboard support is what is agreeably a "mess", not the processor itself, but at least it's functional on ASRock and select Gigabyte boards. As for "a fool to rely on it", not sure what you mean by that. The error correction itself is done by the hardware. Other than calling the initialization routines and providing logging/halt, the BIOS/UEFI isn't responsible for anything afaik.

I'm well aware that this isn't the full grade of ECC support offered by higher-end Xeons and chipset combos, but it's better than nothing and it's affordable.

Also, no offense, but I'm not going to rely on hardwarecanucks as an authority on this subject.

All of the modern i3s and Pentiums support ECC, but you do need the server chipset instead of the cheap consumer stuff. Good news though - those "expensive server boards" are roughly the same price as say, an AM4 motherboard with an X370 chipset.

The goal isn't ECC alone, at least not for me, the goal is an 8-core system with good single-threaded performance and ECC at a reasonable price. As far as I know, only Ryzen offers that.

So for me, I'm looking at the possibility of getting a single system that can give me decent gaming performance, good development performance, ECC support, and more, all at a price that leaves me with money for other components.

[paulmd]

> Also, no offense, but I'm not going to rely on hardwarecanucks as an authority on this subject.

Fine then. AMD says it's unvalidated and unsupported, is that good enough for you?

> I'm well aware that this isn't the full grade of ECC support offered by higher-end Xeons and chipset combos, but it's better than nothing and it's affordable.

So would you be OK with running Xeon engineering samples then? After all - they certainly pass the same "best effort" test. Personally since these are server ES hardware - I'd tend to trust it more than consumer hardware like Ryzen, especially given their comparative age/maturity.

I just picked up a 10-core Haswell Xeon engineering sample for $140 last week. 40% more multi-threaded performance than a Ryzen 1700. The X99 mobo I picked up from Microcenter for $60 doesn't have ECC support but a bunch of them do.

Or if you want something that's official and you know works, there are surplus Sandy Bridge Xeons very cheap nowadays. A decent bit more multithreaded performance than a Ryzen 1700 - but you'll be giving up single-threaded performance. http://natex.us/intel-s2600cp2j-motherboard-dual-e5-2670-sr0...

Or really - a full retail E5-2630 v3 is under $500 now on eBay. That's not really that bad if you just have to have everything in one box.

> So for me, I'm looking at the possibility of getting a single system that can give me decent gaming performance, good development performance, ECC support, and more, all at a price that leaves me with money for other components.

What it comes down to: if you want everything in one box then be prepared to shell out. Everyone has this market segmented out, including AMD (after all they won't stand behind Ryzen's ECC either). If you feel you need ECC, that's really not a valid solution.

If a Xeon doesn't cut it for you - sounds like you might be in the market for two boxes here. A server/workstation with ECC and good multi-thread performance, and a gaming machine that you can overclock and get the best single-thread performance out of.

(Also - in general, overclocking also seems kind of counterproductive to the aims to running ECC RAM - although I guess I haven't looked into that.)

[binarycrusader]

Fine then. AMD says it's unvalidated and unsupported, is that good enough for you?

No, that's not what AMD said, they said it isn't validated by motherboard partners. The functionality is there, it's up to their partners to use it.

So would you be OK with running Xeon engineering samples then? After all - they certainly pass the same "best effort" test. Personally since these are server ES hardware - I'd tend to trust it more than consumer hardware like Ryzen, especially given their comparative age/maturity.

That's not even a remotely accurate comparison.

What it comes down to: if you want everything in one box then be prepared to shell out. Everyone has this market segmented out, including AMD (after all they won't stand behind Ryzen's ECC either). If you feel you need ECC, that's really not a valid solution.

Sorry, but so far all of your proposed "solutions" are summed up as: "If you give up significant performance, functionality, buy second-hand, or completely ignore official support statements, X competitor is the better deal!"

If a Xeon doesn't cut it for you - sounds like you might be in the market for two boxes here. A server/workstation with ECC and good multi-thread performance, and a gaming machine that you can overclock and get the best single-thread performance out of.

No, the goal is to have one system, and at this point, Ryzen looks like the best option. If a competitor decides to release something equivalent, I'll consider them too.

[yuhong]

There was an old HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14004216

[snuxoll]

AFAIK all of the Xeon chips support ECC, every Xeon E3 chip (which uses the desktop socket) I've looked at includes it.

[binarycrusader]

Sorry, I was a little obtuse. What I was inferring was that historically, only higher-priced server chips from Intel had ECC support. In 2013, Intel launched the v3 lower-end Xeon E3s server chips that were closer to the price of the consumer Intel chips and offer ECC with comparable clock speeds. Of course, all of those only have 4 cores instead of 8.

Yes, all of the E3s support ecc, but Xeon's didn't always support ECC until the launch of the Xeon E3 as far as I can tell.

[wtallis]

Xeon has implied ECC support for as long as Xeons have had integrated memory controllers, which is just a generation or two further back than the first Xeon E3 product line. Before that, ECC support was a function of the northbridge.

[binarycrusader]

Hmm, perhaps this is a quirk of ark.intel.com then; it shows that (as an example) that the Xeon X5690 supported ECC, but the Xeon L5638 did not.

The list on WikiPedia also seems to imply that not all models did historically, perhaps this reflects the northbridge change?

[yuhong]

There was the Xeon 3400 even before that. Trivia: it supported registered ECC, but only x8 chips and not x4.

[dogma1138]

Only ASROCK currently has BIOS/UEFI support for ECC.

[binarycrusader]

BIOSTAR specs list ECC support, but I don't know if it has specific BIOS/UEFI options for it.

[dom0]

No chipset has supported ECC for quite a while: Flipping some configuration bits depending on the chipset used is purely an Intel money extraction-engine (Intel ME technology®©™).

Server / workstation class boards normally all do support ECC, though, so no real issue in practice.

[dogma1138]

There are cheap chipsets that support the entry level workstation ones from Intel you can get a motherboard for 65$ with ECC support you don't need to go to x99.

I have a few home storage servers running on the low end Pentiums with ECC support on these.

[mafro]

I just last week bought an ASRock C236 WSI [1] for £170. 8GB of ECC RAM was £80. Granted that five years ago I needed to pay more than twice that amount - so I skipped the ECC :p

[1] http://asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=C236%2...

[xorblurb]

If you use your computing in a way that makes you think about the potential interest of ECC, the price you are likely to target for a rig that fit your needs is extremely probably high enough to get some nice ECC...

[greenshackle2]

Some older AMD desktop chips support ECC.

I built a home NAS from an old board and Phenom II 545 CPU I had lying around, fortuitously they happen to support ECC. DDR2 unregistered ECC ram was a bit of a pain to find though.

[awqrre]

Not only cost, it can also be harder to find a motherboard with ECC support and with all the components/inputs/outputs that you would want in a desktop computer.

[mafro]

See sibling comment: I just picked up an ASRock C236 WSI