Post #2122036

2026-05-02 11:34 UTC

Why do you want ECC? (Hint: unless you're running a business database dealing with financials, you don't need it). I've run Windows server on desktop hardware since the 90's with no issues, and today's hardware is far better than what we had then. The reason people settle on NUCs and SFF desktops is *power*. They virtually sip watts. I don't usually recommend specifics for someone but rather ideas and ways to look at your requirements, but given your requirements (20 TB), it would be worth considering a commercial NAS, or at least a NAS enclosure running a NAS OS like UnRAID or TrueNAS. Expansion is generally not something I'd think about for a NAS (though it can be done today). I expand my NAS once a year (swap out one drive) but I keep 3 local copies - so if it failed I can restore locally rather than from a cloud backup. So your data lives on a NAS, and you can then either run your services there (they mostly support containers, etc these days), but I'd get a NUC or SFF to host that stuff. It makes for nice separation and gives you some flexibility. Back to SFF and NUC - my last desktop hardware *idled* at 100 watts. It was visible on my power bill and used more power than my lights or just about any other single device other than heat or stove. My SFF server idles at just under 20 watts and *peaks* at 80 when I'm converting videos. It currently has 8Tb of storage, but I could easily get 20 in there, it would just be expensive. Oh, and a good NAS can spin down drives to save power when idle, which for most of us is like 90% of the time (I have an ancient NAS as redundancy that does this - it idles around 5w).

Replies (3)

@kata1yst@sh.itjust.works 2026-05-02 12:01

I'll strongly disagree. Anyone who cares about the data they store in their server should care about ECC. There's a specific reason it's used so widely by servers, not just financial databases or whatever. There's also a ton of misinformation on the Internet about it, so don't buy into the "ZFS write hole" or whatever. But ECC is very important in my experience. It's saved my bacon in a material way twice now, and in ways that normal RAM would have just silently continued breaking things. Really that's not much of a price premium if you're willing to buy used, so it's more a question of why not? There are many computers (especially business line computers including low power SFF) that will take ECC or even ship with it from ebay or whatever. Or you can build rigs with ECC, I've done this route twice and had good results.

Open ##2122048
@graynk@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-05-02 16:03

ECC is not a hard requirement for me, but if I can get it - I'll try to, as to me it makes sense for something that runs 24/7 and handles my personal data. I have a very strong aversion to separating storage from my server. I just don't see why I need to route power and network to 2 small boxes (none of which would do what I need it to do on its own + considering *very* crappy room layouts in rented apartments) and then fiddle with network access, when 1 slightly bigger box would do what I need it to do. Some 7-8 years ago I've bought dirt cheap second-hand Huananzhi x79 with Xeon E5 and DDR3-ECC with some low profile NVIDIA GPU and it all still works now - and *something like that* would mostly be OK for me even now (except I left it in another country). That said, it's possible a reasonably powerful NAS will be enough for me on its own?

Open ##2122049
@Rossphorus@lemmy.world 2026-05-02 16:44

Strong disagree. I ran non-ECC memory on my server and services would unexpectedly crash maybe once per week. Over the span of a year I had two databases get corrupted that cost me a lot of time to fix. I tried swapping sticks but it happened with all of them. I switched to ECC memory and the problems disappeared. I needed more memory anyway and the price delta for ECC was about $100. I didn't have to swap CPUs or anything, AMD desktop CPUs and chipsets support it out of the box. ECC memory is absolutely worth it.

Open ##2122050