ecc Server with ECC

[erikr]

I am planning to upgrade my good old server that has been around for some time now. Mostly it is a NAS with 4*4TB disks in a BTRFS RAID 10 array for now. I have since logn used both ZFS and BTRFS and regardless of choice it seems to be a consensus that one shall use ECC memory to prevent that the calculated check sums are faulty.

I have non-ecc today and I have experienced degradation of the content.

ECC is new territory for me and I have a few questions;

1. On my desk is a ASUS Prime X370-PRO mother board. The specs say "DDR4 ECC or NON-ECC memory, unbufferd". While check out some other gaming boards it is more clear that "sure, use ECC or non-ECC as you please - we will not use the ECC-function anyway". Are there anyone that can confirm if ECC will be enabled given that I use compatible ECC me memories?

2. Is there anything particular I need to know to get ECC working? Kernel, use-flags, tools that is to be installed?

3. Is there a way to verify that ECC in fact is in use and operative?

 

Cheers,
Erik

 

[erikr]

So after some struggle I decided to repurpose the above configuration to something else. Major problems has been instability during load (i.e. mostly emerge) with the AMD-cpu and that although there is ECC-memory installed it will not utilize the ECC-function with this motherboard (verified with Asus support-tech). The answer is that ECC is not supported with this configuration.

Instead I have purchased a second hand Supermicro 6027R-E1R12L based on Intel, with working ECC-functionality and hot-swap-slots for all my disks in the front. My first rack-server - a small step for mankind, an huge leap for Erik. There are 32GB RAM and a single Xeon E5-2660 8 Core cpu. It will basically only serve as a ZFS host on the network.

[johnwiki]

I've been reading up on this.

It seems ASUS and Asrock have the best ECC support, however (with Asrock sort of in 1st place)...

If you have a amd cpu with integrated graphics, those do not support ECC.

A lot of ryzens' should on a great many ASUS and Asrock boards, or so they advertise.

The other key with it, is you can't use registered memory with those boards.  It has to be "un-registered" or "un-buffered"
Most server memory is registered ECC, so you have to go to crucial.com and lookup some part numbers for "un-registered" or "un-buffered" memory.

Of course this is all just research, no real experience with it.

[johnwiki]

Sadly for that board, crucial doesn't advertsie any ECC memory ?

https://www.crucial.com/usa/en/compatible-upgrade-for/ASUS/prime-x370-pro

I've seen some Asrock X470's that do have ECC chips on crucial.