Re:Over engineering my homelab so I don't pay cloud providers
by MaKey on Friday August 08, 2025 @04:33AM
(#44834817)
Your VPS provider likely uses servers with ECC RAM, this home server doesn't. For most people it doesn't seem to matter but for me it does - a home server where I store my data needs to have ECC RAM.
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Re:Over engineering my homelab so I don't pay cloud providers
by ninjin on Friday August 08, 2025 @04:42AM
(#44834857)
Seconded, but hard to find for small boxes. I have seen in-band ECC on Asus Nucs, but that is as good as it gets from what I can tell.
Re:Over engineering my homelab so I don't pay cloud providers
by MaKey on Friday August 08, 2025 @06:26AM
(#44835402)
There is the new Minisforum N5 Pro, which supports DDR5 ECC RAM. I'm keeping an eye on it.
Re:Over engineering my homelab so I don't pay cloud providers
by mvanbaak on Friday August 08, 2025 @04:56AM
(#44834935)
totally agree.
That's why my homelab storage server(s) are 2nd hand enterprise machines. They come with ECC.
Re:Over engineering my homelab so I don't pay cloud providers
by dardeaup on Friday August 08, 2025 @09:08AM
(#44836535)
True! Unfortunately, an enterprise machine is more likely to have considerable power draw and quite possibly be much louder. I have a 2013 Apple Mac Pro (trashcan) that uses ECC. They're also cheap, small, and quiet.
Re:Over engineering my homelab so I don't pay cloud providers
by thibaultamartin on Friday August 08, 2025 @02:47PM
(#44840316)
I'm not too familiar with it. Why do you want or need ECC RAM for your homelab?
Re:Over engineering my homelab so I don't pay cloud providers
by MaKey on Friday August 08, 2025 @04:37PM
(#44841459)
ECC RAM protects against bit flips (a bit changing to the wrong state). These can be caused by electric or magnetic interference. A pixel of a picture suddenly having the wrong color because of a bit flip is not that bad but some day an important file might end up corrupted because of one. I want to sleep well at night not having to worry about silent data corruption so ECC RAM it is. See here for more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory