[jodoherty]

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.

[red-iron-pine]

> 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.

What are you doing that demands this level of equipment?

[jodoherty]

DevOps and hosting side projects initially. I never approached full utilization (CPU or memory) with either one as a home server, so now I have a third Precision 7810T with 32 cores (dual Xeon E5-2698 v3 processors) and 32GB of memory that hosts all my side project infrastructure at home (in addition to my website).

Lately I've been doing distributed computing, machine learning, and cybersecurity side projects with them. I can run a variety of environments and tools while still using them to game or for everyday computer tasks (running several multi-core VMs is no problem with this kind of hardware).