On 2014.11.20 08:27, Linda Kateley wrote: > > On 11/20/14, 8:24 AM, Andrew Berg wrote: >> On 2014.11.20 07:21, T L wrote: >>> Andrew - >>> Thanks. My main box also has an AMD CPU, as it was the most cost effective way >>> to get ECC RAM. Hmmm -- speaking of which, I'd be interested in your and >>> Linda's thoughts on the necessity of ECC when using ZFS. >> ZFS doesn't make a difference. ECC RAM is better than non-ECC RAM, and your >> data will be messed up if your non-ECC RAM fails regardless. ZFS will usually >> see that something is wrong and complain about it, even if it can't fix the >> problem. > I always try to make this distinction. Non-ecc is messing up data > everyday, all the time.. At least with zfs you will know about it This reminds me: I should get some motherboard recommendations at the meeting. My current mobo supports ECC RAM, but apparently only some 2GB and 1GB versions, whereas it will be fine with 4GB sticks of non-ECC RAM. I actually had one of the sticks fail and mess things up. In this case, ZFS was actually able to repair all of the damage because of the redundancy in the pool, and it would have taken ages to find out that I had bad RAM if not for checksum failures during scrubs.