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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I really don't know where the "You gotta have ECC RAM!" thing started. I've been running a ZFS RAID on Nvidia Jetson Nanos for years now and haven't had any issues at all with data integrity.

I don't see why ZFS would be more prone to data integrity issues spawning from a lack of ECC than any other filesystem.

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Relevant quote from one of ZFS's primary designers, Matt Ahrens: “There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. ... I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS."

Yeah, I remember reading that a few years ago.

If I were running a server farm or something, then yeah, I'd probably use ECC memory, but I think if you're running a home server, then the argument that ZFS necessitates ECC more than Ext4 or Btrfs or XFS or whatever doesn't really seem to be accurate.

> the argument that ZFS necessitates ECC more than Ext4 or Btrfs or XFS or whatever doesn't really seem to be accurate

Agreed.

> If I were running a server farm or something, then yeah, I'd probably use ECC memory, but I think if you're running a home server

Then you should still use ECC RAM, regardless of what filesystem you're using.

No, really. ECC matters (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25622322) generally.

Fair enough, though AFAIK none of the SBC systems out there have ECC, and I generally use SBCs due to the low power consumption.

Years ago I saw it at:

https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-ram...

(the gist of the scary story is that faulty ram while scrubbing might kill "everything".) However, in the end ECC appears to NOT be so important, e.g., see

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23687895

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