New to considering building a Freenas box for use with Sync (Bit Torrent)

[G+_Daniel Casciato]

New to considering building a Freenas box for use with Sync (Bit Torrent). A number of folks are all religious about ECC memory.

 

This has been inspired by Padre and Patrick in March 2016. Thanks in advance.

[G+_Seth Leedy]

I have SyncThing in use on several devices here. Raspberry Pi, Ubuntu, Windows 10 and a Ubuntu Server. Works well and is not restricted in how many you can use.

https://syncthing.net/

[G+_Jason Granzow]

I don't know what question you're asking but I'm going to assume that you're asking if ECC memory is important in a FreeNAS build. My opinion is that it absolutely is. If you get corruption of data in your RAM then your data will be written corrupted to the hard drives.

 

In reality it depends on what data you are putting in it and how important that data is to you. If it's irreplaceable then I strongly recommend ECC memory. If you don't care if it gets corrupted and lost the go with non-ECC.

 

I hope that answered your question.

[G+_Ben Tyger]

Also the price difference isn't that big if you select a MOBO that supports unbuffered ECC. It's usually only about 10% more over standard unbuffered non-ECC of the same speed/slot. Now if you are talking about registered ECC RAM, that's about %200-%300 over standard RAM prices. I only use that in work servers.

 

To me it is well worth the expense. I use ECC RAM in all my production home servers.

[G+_Travis Hershberger]

I'll second what Jason Granzow already said.  With ZFS (the file system Freenas uses) data is sent to system memory before it's written to disk.  It doesn't get checked for accuracy after being put in system memory.  So if you don't have ECC memory, you will get corrupt data every so often.

 

That said, if it's mostly movie/sound files, then even if you have a corrupt bit somewhere it's normally not going to effect much.  If you have a bunch of office documents, you can loose entire documents very easily.  So the type of data being stored could matter.  The thing is, like Ben Tyger already said, ECC isn't that much more expensive anyway.