Here's my $0.02 on home system design. I'm very interested to hear what others are using in SOHO production or lab environments. I use an ASUS motherboard with an AMD FX-series CPU. Many ASUS boards support ECC, even if they don't exactly jump up and down about it. This board would support up to 32G across it's four RAM slots: >From my Microcenter 2012 receipt bundle: SKU DESCRIPTION QUANTITY PRICE 870741 M5A97 R2.0 Socket AM3+ ATX AMD Motherboard $57.99 006759 FX 6300 Black Edition 3.5GHz Six-Core Socket AM3+ Boxed Processor $129.99 Sadly, the FX-series CPU line hasn't really advanced for a number of years and, I gather, may not in the future. The A-series CPU line / APUs of AMD don't support ECC at this time. Intel has unlocked ECC support lower in their CPU line than in the past: http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?ECCMemory=true&MarketSegment=DT For example, the Pentium G1840 which supports up to 32G of ECC has a box price of just $42. That said, the cheapest ECC supporting motherboard that I know of for Intel sockets is $168 : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182819 A comparable processor to the FX-6300 might be the i-4130 at $120: http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/351/AMD_FX-Series_FX-6300_vs_Intel_Core_i3_i3-4130.html So, the Intel solution is $290 and the AMD one is about $160 (current prices, not the ones above). In the context of a 32G RAM, 28T of drive space system, that's not much. In the context of a 4G RAM, 4T drive space system, it's a noticeable fraction of the cost. Thomas On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 8:35 AM, Andrew Berg <aberg010 at my.hennepintech.edu> wrote: > 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. > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list