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Comment by benoau | Hacker News Reader

We're kind of stumbling into a golden age of home NAS devices and while there aren't any ready-to-go ECC options yet, you can buy lovely little cases to support your own components. I think we'll surely see ECC in the next generation of AOOSTAR and similar devices, nobody making these devices has any motivation to never implement ECC.

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How exactly are companies like AOOSTAR going to implement ECC if it's not supported by the CPU vendor (which is Intel)? AMD CPUs are useless for these home NAS devices if your goal is to build a low-power media server, which I think is one of the main use-cases (why else would you want to store tens of terabytes of data at home?).

ECC has been growing in support since ~12th generation Intel (currently 14th) and before that for AMD I think, so it is only a matter of time before this trickles down into the little NAS boxes.

>ECC has been growing in support since ~12th generation Intel (currently 14th)

It is? How so? I don't see it anywhere outside their server and embedded products. The server-grade stuff isn't appropriate for "the little NAS boxes" used at home because of both expense and more importantly power consumption, and the embedded stuff just isn't really available to consumers (so it might be potentially great for a company like Synology that builds consumer-friendly pre-built NAS boxes running on proprietary software, but it's not useful to people building their own DIY NAS boxes running open-source software).

ECC is supported on any higher end 12th/13th Gen, but it's locked behind a chipset feature lock. If you can find any board that uses W680 (e.g. W680D4U-2L2T which can be had on Amazon for $569), then it's possible to use ECC UDIMM on Intel Core and have ECC detected/reported.

>e.g. W680D4U-2L2T which can be had on Amazon for $569

Yeah, that cost puts it out of reach for the typical home users building relatively inexpensive little DIY media server boxes, and places it firmly in "server" territory. A standard motherboard for these CPUs (typically using a B760 chipset) is a very small fraction of that cost.

It's good to know this factoid, but it still basically supports my prior assertion that on Intel, ECC support is basically only for servers.

The very old HP Microserver Gen7's used a low power AMD cpu, as did the original Gen10 model.

The Gen7 things would never be useful for transcoding on cpu though, waaaaaay too underpowered.

But they did have a PCIe slot for add-in cards (ie small gpu or network card).

Of course you can add a GPU card on the PCIe slot, but this 1) takes away a slot, and PCIe lanes, that you might want to use for connecting storage devices (such as a SATA HBA card), and 2) this will probably poorly affect your system's overall power consumption, which is a big factor for home users building NAS/media server boxes. Intel's QuickSync performs extremely well, with very low power (esp at idle) for 4k transcoding, for very low cost, while not needing any PCIe lanes; it's why these CPUs are so popular for this application. Unfortunately, Intel stupidly refuses to allow ECC support on non-Xeon chips, so that's a big drawback, as ECC is really useful for a storage server (or really anywhere).

> Intel stupidly refuses to allow ECC support on non-Xeon chips

They at least used to support ECC on some models of i3 chips as well.

My understanding was that was specifically to support ECC on lower power NAS systems.

Random examples:

• https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/90729/i... (6th gen i3)

• https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/97455/i... (7th gen i3)

• https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/129944/... (8th gen i3)

• https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/190886/... (9th gen i3)

• https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/203899/... (10th gen i3)

Looking over random i3 pages from 11th gen onwards though, I'm not even seeing ECC mentioned on the pages at all.

It's not a "yes/no" item like on the older generation ones pages, it's completely absent (from the ones I just checked). :(

It looks like these CPUs were specifically targeted at embedded devices; they aren't things you can normally purchase yourself easily like the regular desktop chips, and if you look at the desktop variants (the ones without any letter suffixes), they don't support ECC.

You can still see it even in 13th generation CPUs: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/232105/...

But as you can see here, this is an embedded variant; you're not going to find it at Amazon, as it's probably only sold directly to manufacturers.

> they aren't things you can normally purchase yourself easily like the regular desktop chips

That's not really relevant to the point of them only allowing ECC on Xeon chips though. They do (or at least did) support ECC on non-Xeon chips.

These days though, people are probably better off buying an appropriate Ryzen processor and motherboard that explicitly supports ECC. That's what I did anyway. :)

>These days though, people are probably better off buying an appropriate Ryzen processor and motherboard that explicitly supports ECC.

As I pointed out before, you can't do that for a media server. Transcoding is necessary for many (most?) users.

>That's not really relevant to the point of them only allowing ECC on Xeon chips though. They do (or at least did) support ECC on non-Xeon chips.

That's a distinction without a difference: those other non-Xeon chips aren't useful if you can't even buy them because you're not an OEM.

They look pretty easily available to me, or are you going to exclude Ebay now as well?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/305342386279 (note: I don't know the seller)

Yes, I'd exclude anything on the secondhand market, especially things you have to buy from overseas sellers where there's no possibility of support or returns. This is not like a normal new part where you can purchase it firsthand and expect it to perform as advertised or else get a refund. Furthermore, the (Intel) chipsets on motherboards sold to consumers don't normally support ECC either, so it seems you'd have to get something that's not designed to Intel specifications, probably on Aliexpress, so it's questionable if ECC would even work, and you can certainly forget about any warranty or returns.

Seriously, if you can't just buy it at Best Buy/NewEgg/Amazon (not from 3rd-party overseas sellers), then it's not applicable to this discussion at all.

> if you can't just buy it at Best Buy/NewEgg/Amazon (not from 3rd-party overseas sellers), then it's not applicable to this discussion at all.

Maybe the problems you were having with sourcing the cpus you wanted have something to do with the arbitrary limitations you were working under?

Meanwhile, other people (as per sibling comment) were able to buy these same chips without issue. ;)

> if you look at the desktop variants (the ones without any letter suffixes), they don't support ECC.

That's not correct. I literally linked to some non-suffixed processors that support ECC in the comment you're replying to.

I don't see any currently-sold CPUs there. Everything is years out-of-date, maybe even a decade.

I own one if these i3s from 6th gen. Bought at retail. Nothing special.

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