That's a really good point about ECC RAM. In my research about all the wonders of ZFS, they do make it very clear that it's only as good as the hardware, and if a cosmic ray flips a bit inside RAM during a write operation, it's permanent and you have no way to recover unless you have a separate backup. Of course, it's no worse than a
regular filesystem writing bad data, but the whole point of this is to be
robust.
What I have in my old tower NAS is this: (purchased in 2015)
Corsair Vengeance Pro 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR3-1866 CL9 Memory
What I'm looking at now is this:
A-Tech 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3 1600 MHz PC3-12800R ECC RDIMM 2Rx4 1.5V ECC Registered DIMM 240-Pin
(or maybe I'll splurge for 32 GB)
I thought ECC RAM was supposed to be a lot more expensive than “regular” non-ECC RAM. Have I misunderstood this for all these years?
Or am I missing something else?
Also, every stick of RAM I've bought in recent memory has included an attached heat spreader (like that Corsair one). I see these A-Tech sticks don't have any. Any thoughts on that, T? Do you think it's worth grabbing a pair and attaching them? Or is the problem of keeping the RAM cool more a lot more overblown than it actually is, or something that only affects serious overclockers and hardcore gamers?