Build Help

[steelers7]

Hi everyone!

I am in the process of putting together a home build and after a ton of research, I am just going to ask for help.

I am confused on two things - ECC memory and hard drives.

I intend on purchasing a Ryzen 7 3700x with 64GB of non-ECC memory (eventually expand up to 128gb). My reasoning was that I didn't intend on storing any data on this server (I have a NAS), but after researching, it appears as if most people recommend ZFS which I believe has an ECC requirement. This isn't ideal for me, since ECC memory is somewhat difficult to find for the Ryzen processors (though supported). Which somewhat leads into my hard drive question - I intended on using two Inland Premium SSD's (1600 TBW) in RAID 1 as my boot drive/VM storage, but the more I read about it, the more it appears as if this will destroy the SSD's.

So I guess I have two questions:

1. Should I be using ECC memory, even if I don't intend on using ZFS?
2. If putting the Proxmox OS on a consumer grade SSD is a bad idea, should I look into purchasing two mechanical hard drives (I assume two NAS HDD's would be fine) as the boot drive and use the two SSD's as VM storage only?

Hopefully I provided enough information, but if I can provide any further information, please let me know. Thanks a lot for your help!

 

[leesteken]

ZFS does not have an ECC requirement. You can use it fine with all its features without ECC-memory. Because ZFS storage can reliable detect disk drive errors (because it uses checksums everywhere), the memory becomes the weakest link. If an error would occur in memory. ZFS will not always detect this. Therefore, ZFS is (slightly) better with ECC, but it is not necessary.

Several people reported problems with some SSD, but it is unclear to me which ones will have problems and why exactly this is happening. I think you will notice write-amplification and/or degradation issues quite quickly if it does happen to you, and maybe you can use those drives for something else. Or choose at least one SSD that has been reported to work fine.

 

[steelers7]

ZFS does not have an ECC requirement. You can use it fine with all its features without ECC-memory. Because ZFS storage can reliable detect disk drive errors (because it uses checksums everywhere), the memory becomes the weakest link. If an error would occur in memory. ZFS will not always detect this. Therefore, ZFS is (slightly) better with ECC, but it is not necessary.

Several people reported problems with some SSD, but it is unclear to me which ones will have problems and why exactly this is happening. I think you will notice write-amplification and/or degradation issues quite quickly if it does happen to you, and maybe you can use those drives for something else. Or choose at least one SSD that has been reported to work fine.

Thanks so much for the input, I really appreciate it! I am coming from a FreeNAS perspective, where people will blatantly tell you ECC memory is "required" for ZFS, so I apologize for the confusion.

Do you have a recommendation for someone who hasn't bought hardware yet? Avoiding ECC memory is ideal, but from a storage perspective, any suggestions? I do intend on buying two NVMe SSD's for VM's, but should I buy a separate HDD/SSD for Proxmox? LVM or ZFS?

I realize these are fairly specific questions, but there's so much information online as far as why one is better than the other but very few revolve around actual hardware.

Thanks so much!!

 

[r.jochum]

Have a look at Samsung's PM983 Series for NVMe SSD