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Matt Zerella
Oct 7, 2002


CommieGIR posted:

Please use ECC RAM.

It really does make a significant impact to data integrity and will prevent downtime. I've had machines run for 5-6 years without error due to it, whereas I've had desktops crash and burn repeatedly due to errors that ECC would have caught.

That's also before you get into that boards designed to use ECC RAM are also generally designed to be fault tolerant of DIMM failures. If data integrity is not a big thing for your home NAS, fine, its up to you, but frankly its a worthwhile investment.

As for in a datacenter environment, it used to be you could get away without ECC due to failover ability and you had more metal available to failover to, however, due to increasing consolidation due to virtualization, that's not as common anymore.

Narrators voice: It's not

NAS isn't backup and anything important you have should be backed up offsite in an encrypted container. If you're doing white box shit at home, by all means go for ECC but people sperg about it way too hard. I do not care if some bit rot hits my collection of Linux ISOs.

The only people who I'd say are the exception are people with data caps. Otherwise, downloading some stuff again isn't hard.

E: sorry, to come off less dickish, I get that we are nerds and building stuff at home is fun. If you want ECC, go for it. I'm just saying it shouldn't be a holdup or if you can't afford it feel you should wait for it.

Matt Zerella fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Aug 10, 2017

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

If Godzilla can do it, you know I can deliver!

Pillbug

Matt Zerella posted:

Narrators voice: It's not

NAS isn't backup and anything important you have should be backed up offsite in an encrypted container. If you're doing white box shit at home, by all means go for ECC but people sperg about it way too hard. I do not care if some bit rot hits my collection of Linux ISOs.

The only people who I'd say are the exception are people with data caps. Otherwise, downloading some stuff again isn't hard.

...I never claimed NAS was a backup?

Matt Zerella posted:

I do not care if some bit rot hits my collection of Linux ISOs.

But I do. Frankly, I sleep better knowing I'm not backup up bit-rotted garbage onto my nightly backups from my NAS. And no, not everything you download can be found again, I have a lot of stuff that is no longer available that I keep on my storage and I'd prefer I not worry about its integrity.

And yeah, I wasn't saying ECC was a GO/NOGO issue, but the prices for ECC versus Non-ECC have just gotten so close, if you are building from scratch you might as well spend just $5-10 more and get it.

DrDork
Dec 29, 2003
commanding officer of the Army of Dorkness

Indeed, for most people it's a cost vs effort issue: if you're re-purposing hardware you already have, and what you've got doesn't have ECC, you're probably going to be ok. Yeah, you run the risk of something getting dicked up eventually, but the hassle of re-downloading your foreign arthouse scat movies or whatever is probably not worth the cost of buying all new hardware.

On the other hand, if you're rolling your own custom box from scratch, the price difference between ECC and non-ECC is pretty minimal, so you might as well get it.

Matt Zerella
Oct 7, 2002


To be fair I did not know ECC has lowered in price that much. Carry on and sorry if I came off like a troll.

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

If Godzilla can do it, you know I can deliver!

Pillbug

Matt Zerella posted:

To be fair I did not know ECC has lowered in price that much. Carry on and sorry if I came off like a troll.

Its fine, I didn't take it that way so much

I actually run disk to disk backups

Our NAS backs up nightly to a USB Drive, and then that gets swapped out monthly in a fire box with another USB drive.

CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Aug 10, 2017

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

CommieGIR posted:

Please use ECC RAM.

It really does make a significant impact to data integrity and will prevent downtime. I've had machines run for 5-6 years without error due to it, whereas I've had desktops crash and burn repeatedly due to errors that ECC would have caught.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you have no idea whether the desktops which 'crashed and burned' would have even been usable with ECC, since a bad DIMM and a metric ton of ECC failures is just as much a failure scenario as cosmic rays. Sure, your system stays up if there's more than one DIMM, but the usability while that's happening sucks. Not to mention it could just be cheap capacitors on the motherboard, and ECC-capable systems tend to cost more.

CommieGIR posted:

That's also before you get into that boards designed to use ECC RAM are also generally designed to be fault tolerant of DIMM failures. If data integrity is not a big thing for your home NAS, fine, its up to you, but frankly its a worthwhile investment.
Which is the whole point. This is the 'consumer NAS' thread, not the 'buy ECC-capable server gear so you can mitigate the incredibly tiny risk of data corruption on reads'. You're more likely to get corruption from a failing NIC than cosmic rays.

CommieGIR posted:

As for in a datacenter environment, it used to be you could get away without ECC due to failover ability and you had more metal available to failover to, however, due to increasing consolidation due to virtualization, that's not as common anymore.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that datacenters haven't run server-class ECC-capable hardware for years and years for anything and everything important, and virtualization hasn't changed that. Failing over (which also happens with compute hosts) doesn't do you any good if your SQL server had bad memory and committed a bunch of terrible transactions.

D. Ebdrup posted:

If availability is what you're after, and it typically is when it comes to servers, there's a few pieces of scientific research that point to ECC being almost-required (and that it lack is a bigger problem than some people seem to think), which seems obvious when you know that ECC is one of the things referred to under the umbrella of RAS, which exist to ensure high-availability. The standard ECC memory you get for the type of servers usually brought up in this thread can only correct for one error in the entire DIMM at a time, whereas other types of ECC can protect against multiple errors on the same chip (Chipkill, Extended ECC, Advanced ECC, Lockstep Memory), as well as the loss of entire DIMMs (Redundant Array of Independent NAND and RAISE level 2).

That's word-for-word what one of ZFS' fathers - who was hired straight out of school, to work on ZFS - said.
I personally interpret that to mean "use ECC for any system which contains data you really care about, regardless of whether it's using ZFS or not, and use ZFS if you're serious about it".

How important is your anime?

CommieGIR posted:

But I do. Frankly, I sleep better knowing I'm not backup up bit-rotted garbage onto my nightly backups from my NAS. And no, not everything you download can be found again, I have a lot of stuff that is no longer available that I keep on my storage and I'd prefer I not worry about its integrity.
This is the point with ZFS, though. Once it's written, there's basically zero chance of bit rot, with or without ECC, unless you're rewriting the entire thing every day. It's only while the data is 'on the fly' in buffers before a write that ECC makes a difference to ZFS.

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

If Godzilla can do it, you know I can deliver!

Pillbug

We're talking whitebox builds, not off the shelf NAS in this case. ECC is still a worthy whitebox investment for consumers.

And I do datacenter engineering consulting, trust me, there's a lot of stuff I've found that was non-ECC hardware and was production.

You realize that Google built their entire original production system on non-ECC hardware and just took the hit with cheap high availability? Its not as uncommon as you think.

evol262 posted:

This is the point with ZFS, though. Once it's written, there's basically zero chance of bit rot, with or without ECC, unless you're rewriting the entire thing every day. It's only while the data is 'on the fly' in buffers before a write that ECC makes a difference to ZFS.

Layers of protection is better than a single layer. The assumption that anything on your NAS is simply disposable data is kind of denigrating, maybe they don't want to risk their data, regardless if its private anime collection or digitized documents like your will, deed to your house, and backups of bank and ID documentation.

CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Aug 10, 2017

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





Let's be frank here - the primary reason ECC is something that's annoying to deal with is Intel's insistence on using it for market segmentation. Even though more of their chips support it, it becomes a motherboard issue and thus is hard to get outside of server boards.

AMD has supported ECC across the board for a long time, but their chips have been garbage until now. Do the low end Ryzen chips support ECC? That could be a very interesting option.

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

If Godzilla can do it, you know I can deliver!

Pillbug

IOwnCalculus posted:

Let's be frank here - the primary reason ECC is something that's annoying to deal with is Intel's insistence on using it for market segmentation. Even though more of their chips support it, it becomes a motherboard issue and thus is hard to get outside of server boards.

AMD has supported ECC across the board for a long time, but their chips have been garbage until now. Do the low end Ryzen chips support ECC? That could be a very interesting option.

According to this Ryzen is:

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...-deep-dive.html

But depends upon your motherboard, naturally its unbuffered only.

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

CommieGIR posted:

We're talking whitebox builds, not off the shelf NAS in this case. ECC is still a worthy whitebox investment for consumers.
Yes, in a microserver. This thread overbuilds to the extreme, and shoving a supermicro board and Xeon into a case that's running storage exemplifies that. Sure it's nice, but it's completely overbuilt and unnecessary, and that comes along with increased noise and power costs, generally.

CommieGIR posted:

And I do datacenter engineering consulting, trust me, there's a lot of stuff I've found that was non-ECC hardware and was production.
Sorry to hear that. I spent 10 years in datacenter work before I moved to development, and literally never saw it.

CommieGIR posted:

You realize that Google built their entire original production system on non-ECC hardware and just took the hit with cheap high availability? Its not as uncommon as you think.
Yes, it is. Using Google as an example is like saying "world-class athlete so-and-so doesn't do X" (for example, Ilya Ilin doesn't squat to depth). Google didn't use ECC because they were using their own distributed filesystem and running a homegrown sharded data layer on top of it, having "cattle" in a pre cattle analogy world. Similarly, some companies automatically scale out on AWS and don't care about their instances. Some run "pets" on VMware.

People don't "take the hit" for Oracle/SQL Server/boxes. Your webserver? Who cares. Something that touches data which makes you money? It's ECC.

CommieGIR posted:

Layers of protection is better than a single layer. The assumption that anything on your NAS is simply disposable data is kind of denigrating, maybe they don't want to risk their data, regardless if its private anime collection or digitized documents like your will, deed to your house, and backups of bank and ID documentation.
My NAS is 30TB. Most of it is replaceable. The things which aren't are backed up in multiple places, with hardcopies of legal documents.

Again, though, ZFS doesn't bit rot even without ECC. The open question is "is this anime I downloaded yesterday and haven't watched yet going to have an uncorrected error which makes it unusable?" And the answer to that question 99% of the time is no.

Even when migrating to a new system, you can just swap the disks, zfs send/recv, or use rsync (which also checksums).

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

If Godzilla can do it, you know I can deliver!

Pillbug

evol262 posted:

Yes, in a microserver. This thread overbuilds to the extreme, and shoving a supermicro board and Xeon into a case that's running storage exemplifies that. Sure it's nice, but it's completely overbuilt and unnecessary, and that comes along with increased noise and power costs, generally.

...yes, like I pointed out, we are talking Whitebox NAS not off the shelf stuff.


evol262 posted:

Sorry to hear that. I spent 10 years in datacenter work before I moved to development, and literally never saw it.

...good for you?

evol262 posted:


My NAS is 30TB. Most of it is replaceable. The things which aren't are backed up in multiple places, with hardcopies of legal documents.

Again, though, ZFS doesn't bit rot even without ECC. The open question is "is this anime I downloaded yesterday and haven't watched yet going to have an uncorrected error which makes it unusable?" And the answer to that question 99% of the time is no.

Even when migrating to a new system, you can just swap the disks, zfs send/recv, or use rsync (which also checksums).

Cool. That's great. I'm gonna stick with my ECC RAM. I'm also not running ZFS, so maybe that's why I'm a little confused with your Evangelism.

So, hey, keep on evangelizing I guess? I guess we can't discuss building microservers as NAS since you'll pop out of the woodwork and bash everyone over the head.

Incessant Excess
Aug 15, 2005

Cause of glitch:
Pretentiousness


Incessant Excess posted:

Anyone have experience with the Western Digital My Cloud products? I've found a decent deal on the EX4100 with 8TB and I'm wondering if the things any good or not, would mainly be using it to store media and automatically download from Usenet.

This thing here https://www.amazon.com/EX4100-Exper...e/dp/B00TB8XN2E

I found out that this thing sadly doesn't support running Usenet apps like Sonarr and Couchpotato. Does anyone have a recommendation for a 4bay NAS that can run usenet software? I've looked at the Synology DS416J for this purpose but was told that CPU might be too slow.

Thermopyle
Jul 1, 2003

...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. —Bertrand Russell



CommieGIR posted:


But I do. Frankly, I sleep better knowing I'm not backup up bit-rotted garbage onto my nightly backups from my NAS. And no, not everything you download can be found again, I have a lot of stuff that is no longer available that I keep on my storage and I'd prefer I not worry about its integrity.

And yeah, I wasn't saying ECC was a GO/NOGO issue, but the prices for ECC versus Non-ECC have just gotten so close, if you are building from scratch you might as well spend just $5-10 more and get it.

FYI, the reason you got pushback is your original post made it sound like a GO/NOGO issue.

CommieGIR posted:

Please use ECC RAM.

It really does make a significant impact to data integrity and will prevent downtime. I've had machines run for 5-6 years without error due to it, whereas I've had desktops crash and burn repeatedly due to errors that ECC would have caught.

That's also before you get into that boards designed to use ECC RAM are also generally designed to be fault tolerant of DIMM failures. If data integrity is not a big thing for your home NAS, fine, its up to you, but frankly its a worthwhile investment.

As for in a datacenter environment, it used to be you could get away without ECC due to failover ability and you had more metal available to failover to, however, due to increasing consolidation due to virtualization, that's not as common anymore.

This oversells your case by a lot.

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

If Godzilla can do it, you know I can deliver!

Pillbug

Thermopyle posted:

FYI, the reason you got pushback is your original post made it sound like a GO/NOGO issue.

Your right, and I did go back and highlight that its not a GO/NOGO issue. Sorry.

eames
May 9, 2009



Ever since I read about that case where a security researcher registered bit-flipped domain names and successfully served spoofed versions of apple.com/google.com/microsoft.com to thousands of (mobile) users per day, I'm really trying to go with ECC whenever I can.

IIRC in the end he "injected" his own picture on an official google.com page because one of google's webservers delivered a domain-bit-flipped version to their CDN and it got cached there for days. ECC RAM is cool and good.

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!

Look for DNS bitrot on YouTube, it's more fun as presentation.

D. Ebdrup
Mar 13, 2009



evol262 posted:

How important is your anime?
My anims and other packrat issue isn't that important, except I'd have a tough time replacing some of it if it wasn't all backed up to SpiderOak and external offline disks, since some of it is quite rare (to the point that some quite extensive searching on the clear web has turned up nothing, so I'd have to trawl the deep web for it, and even then I wouldn't have any guarantees). Feel free to imagine I also said something about RAID not being backup, but I think I've harped on that all too often at this point.
I did point out in the second word of my post that it was about availability. Both of the stuff that's on the server, but also all the things it's hosting. It's my VPN target for private/secure internetting with public hotspots/networks I don't trust, my cloud solution, where I get TV and music from when I'm on the go, it's where several other machines back up to, and a lot of other things.
I'd really rather prefer if it could stay up in situations where any of my other machines wouldn't have because a flipped bit happened in the memory that belongs to the kernel or one of its drivers, causing it to panic (which, according to the Microsoft study I linked, happens way more often than I would've expected for how relatively small a kernel is).

Xae
Jan 19, 2005



I just ordered 32gb of ECC memory for my little T20 server.

It was $25 more per dimm. I don't really care about my data too much, but the price was low enough that it seemed dumb to debate.

We're in this thread dropping thousands of dollars on questionable purchases in the first place. A hundred more bucks as an insurance policy to prevent it from all going down in flames seemed like a good investment.

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

CommieGIR posted:

...yes, like I pointed out, we are talking Whitebox NAS not off the shelf stuff.
The question is how many people actually need a whitebox vs 4 drives in a microserver. It's less than you think. You're talking about whiteboxes. Not everyone in the thread does that.

CommieGIR posted:

...good for you?
The idea is not to make authoritative statements like "people used to not use ECC because failover, which virt has obsoleted" based only on your experience, because everyone's is different. I've been in a lot of environments, and even the hacked together ones mostly used supermicros with ECC, outside of one shop that ran everything on Mac minis for no good reason.

It's not good for me or bad for you (well, I do kind of feel sorry for datacenter ops people working with a bunch of hacked up hardware, but meh), and more that it's not nearly as universal as you made it sound.

CommieGIR posted:

Cool. That's great. I'm gonna stick with my ECC RAM. I'm also not running ZFS, so maybe that's why I'm a little confused with your Evangelism.
The NAS thread is probably 80% ZFS, and a lot of the ECC discussion was around it. I don't use it either, but ok. There are a lot more people in the thread than you and I.

Note that ext4 also has basic checksumming support (not as a default), among others. This lack of "bit rot" is not specific to ZFS. Most filesystems provide a way to do it, albeit not as completely as ZFS/btrfs.

CommieGIR posted:

So, hey, keep on evangelizing I guess? I guess we can't discuss building microservers as NAS since you'll pop out of the woodwork and bash everyone over the head.

Please reread the discussion you were in the middle of, then stop. It's about replacing a QNAP (broadly), but "I'm gonna build something" doesn't have to mean "I'm gonna overbuild something", and the linked list of components isn't anything to write home about or a reason to clamor for ECC.

evol262 fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Aug 10, 2017

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

If Godzilla can do it, you know I can deliver!

Pillbug

I don't know why you feel the need to continue hammering on me...

CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Aug 10, 2017

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

CommieGIR posted:

I don't know why you feel the need to continue hammering on me...

Really not trying to argue, just clarifying. It's super tempting to buy a 24 bay Norco, 2 m1015s, breakout cables, etc. I did that whole thing.

That said, I can pull ~300mb/s on multipathed iscsi with a system that's 25% of the size and power draw, plus it's a little quieter.

We all have different priorities, and I'm a developer working from home with a large lab (8 compute nodes), so I'm not a light user, but I eventually valued silence and space efficiency as long as the performance and space was large enough.

For someone upgrading from a QNAP, it's probably more than they need. The advantage of prebuilt stuff as I get older is that I don't want to play janitor with part picking, cable management, finding the right low db fans, etc. I want something which "just works" out of the box, but lets me put my own software on it. So, in essence, I value convenience over maximum performance/storage capacity.

I'm guessing I'm not the only one. Just presenting an alternate opinion.

I will hammer "you must have ECC!!!!" because there's very little evidence that it matters for a NAS with a modern filesystem at home despite the groupthink, but a microserver supports ECC anyway, so...

Djarum
Apr 1, 2004

I promise, that one day, everything's going to be better for you.



Soiled Meat

Incessant Excess posted:

I found out that this thing sadly doesn't support running Usenet apps like Sonarr and Couchpotato. Does anyone have a recommendation for a 4bay NAS that can run usenet software? I've looked at the Synology DS416J for this purpose but was told that CPU might be too slow.

Honestly, just build yourself a little mini ITX system for something like this. I have a setup with a z170 board, a i3 6100 and 16GB of RAM that I spent under $300 on not counting the drives. It is so much better than dealing with the MyCloud I had earlier. You can likely get away with lower specs than me, but the cost difference was so little it made little sense at the time.

Paul MaudDib
May 3, 2006

"Tell me of your home world, Usul"


Djarum posted:

Honestly, just build yourself a little mini ITX system for something like this. I have a setup with a z170 board, a i3 6100 and 16GB of RAM that I spent under $300 on not counting the drives. It is so much better than dealing with the MyCloud I had earlier. You can likely get away with lower specs than me, but the cost difference was so little it made little sense at the time.

The tradeoff is space, there are very few off-the-shelf cases that come close to the number of drives you can pack into Synology with an equivalent volume. And when they do, they're usually a specialty product you'll pay a premium for, you'll have to deal with the usual clearance/thermal problems of small mITX builds, etc. Small, powerful, runs cool: pick up to two.

U-NAS makes a couple 2-bay and 4-bay variants of that 8-bay case I've been eyeballing.

Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Aug 11, 2017

Sir Bobert Fishbone
Jan 16, 2006

Beebort


Incessant Excess posted:

I found out that this thing sadly doesn't support running Usenet apps like Sonarr and Couchpotato. Does anyone have a recommendation for a 4bay NAS that can run usenet software? I've looked at the Synology DS416J for this purpose but was told that CPU might be too slow.

I run Sonarr, Couchpotato, and sabnzbd on my 2-bay DS215j. I'm not a power user, by any stretch, but it does the job just fine for me.

Djarum
Apr 1, 2004

I promise, that one day, everything's going to be better for you.



Soiled Meat

Paul MaudDib posted:

The tradeoff is space, there are very few off-the-shelf cases that come close to the number of drives you can pack into Synology with an equivalent volume. And when they do, they're usually a specialty product you'll pay a premium for, you'll have to deal with the usual clearance/thermal problems of small mITX builds, etc. Small, powerful, runs cool: pick up to two.

U-NAS makes a couple 2-bay and 4-bay variants of that 8-bay case I've been eyeballing.

I have a Node 304 for my case. I have 6 drives in it, the temps have never been over 43 degrees and it is tiny enough for me. By the time I need more storage larger drives will be available.

Paul MaudDib
May 3, 2006

"Tell me of your home world, Usul"


Djarum posted:

I have a Node 304 for my case. I have 6 drives in it, the temps have never been over 43 degrees and it is tiny enough for me. By the time I need more storage larger drives will be available.

Oh wow, that's actually a huge capacity for that size of case, nice. Fractal Design does such nice stuff. I really want them to try and make a super-tiny case that fits full ATX.

I have a CM Elite 130 that appears to be a similar size, and it's like two drives plus one in the 5.25" bay IIRC. I hate that case, it's just too big for the capabilities it offers. I bought it because it was $35 or something vv I'm about to repurpose the guts of that PC (Athlon 5350) plus a SAS controller into an "enclosure" for my new tape drive, but I just won't miss that case at all.

I totally miss the AM1 platform for this shit though. It's been a nice little fileserver. It was perfectly capable of running SABnzbd and Sonarr and shit, it's not as fast as a G4560 but it's got 4 fairly decent laptop cores. In practice the only place you'd notice it would be in extracting a huge file or something. It pulled 35W at full load and you could get a mobo+CPU for $40-50. Only downside was only 2 SATA ports on the board, and no boards bigger than mATX.

Even weirder it actually has ECC support on chip, just none of the mobos exposed it. It had AES-NI too. It would have been a pretty cute little NAS board, especially after the whole C2550/C2750 fiasco. DDR3L is going to be around for a while, AMD is missing out.

Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 06:47 on Aug 11, 2017

Desuwa
Jun 2, 2011

I'm telling my mommy. That pubbie doesn't do video games right!

ZFS doesn't have any special requirements for ECC but if you care about your data then you're running ECC memory, a checksumming file system, regular scrubs, and backups anyway. You can't skip any part of that chain.

Backups won't help you if you're backing up corrupt data, and nothing can help you if you write corrupt data. My backups, as well as the backups of everyone else in this thread, rely on my NAS providing the backup service with either good data or errors.

Repurposing old desktops to use as a NAS is fine but my strong opinion is that if you're buying hardware for it you should go for ECC.

If I end up going with Threadripper for my next desktop I'll also be going with ECC memory. As I replace my machines I want to move towards only storing data on ZFS and only using ECC memory at home.

Djarum
Apr 1, 2004

I promise, that one day, everything's going to be better for you.



Soiled Meat

Paul MaudDib posted:

Oh wow, that's actually a huge capacity for that size of case, nice. Fractal Design does such nice stuff. I really want them to try and make a super-tiny case that fits full ATX.

I have a CM Elite 130 and it's like two plus one in the 5.25" bay IIRC. I hate that case, it's just too big for the capabilities it offers. I bought it because it was $35 or something vv I'm about to repurpose the guts of that PC (Athlon 5350) plus a SAS controller into an "enclosure" for my new tape drive, but I just won't miss that case at all.

I totally miss the AM1 platform for this shit though. It's been a nice little fileserver. It was perfectly capable of running SABnzbd and Sonarr and shit, it's not as fast as a G4560 but it's got 4 fairly decent laptop cores. In practice the only place you'd notice it would be in extracting a huge file or something. It pulled 35W at full load and you could get a mobo+CPU for $40-50. Only downside was only 2 SATA ports on the board, and no boards bigger than mATX.

Even weirder it actually has ECC support on chip, just none of the mobos exposed it. It would have been a pretty cute little NAS board, especially after the whole C2550/C2750 fiasco. DDR3L is going to be around for a while, AMD is missing out.

Problem is with full ATX you can only make a case so tiny, effectively you are looking at a old school desktop sort of style. Theoretically you could mount the mobo vertically but then you are effectively a minitower.

I am really hoping that someone makes a mini ITX Threadripper board. Granted I have no idea how you would be able to make it happen in that form factor due to the size of the chip itself. Couple that with having to make onboard video as well and it would be a engineering nightmare.

ECC support is hit and miss even on boards that say they support it. For example my motherboard says it supports ECC yet will not boot if it is installed. I have tried several other chip/board combos that say they should work with ECC but they do not. I imagine that most of the audience for this stuff never uses it so they don't get called out on it.

Star War Sex Parrot
Oct 2, 2003



Muldoon

I've got 12TB drives here and nothing to put them in

Maybe I can tear apart my Time Capsule and stick one in there.

G-Prime
Apr 30, 2003

Baby, when it's love,
if it's not rough it isn't fun.


Got 8 of them? You can put them in my NAS. You know, for safe keeping.

IOwnCalculus
Apr 2, 2003





I'm sure most of the thread could keep those drives busy for you.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT


IOwnCalculus posted:

I'm sure most of the thread could keep those drives busy for you.

This.

I am ashamed in here with 2x8tb (synced nightly), 2 SSDs and two 2tb drives for random shit.

Paul MaudDib
May 3, 2006

"Tell me of your home world, Usul"


Djarum posted:

I am really hoping that someone makes a mini ITX Threadripper board. Granted I have no idea how you would be able to make it happen in that form factor due to the size of the chip itself. Couple that with having to make onboard video as well and it would be a engineering nightmare.

mITX would be a challenge, just the socket takes up almost the entire mITX form factor and no question you'd need to drop to SODIMM format sticks. I think it might just barely be possible with some very creative use of daughterboards, inline module sockets (for daughterboards or RAM), and placing a whole bunch of this on the backside of the motherboard. But that's going to be the most insane board of all time, and your cooling game for the chipset/discretes better be fucking on-point or else the whole thing is going China Syndrome.



Somewhere an Asrock engineer just woke up in a cold sweat and doesn't know why.

With that kind of form factor you may well have to give up native video output and just use serial (or set it up on a discrete GPU and then run headless). Wouldn't be the first server/workstation board where that's your tradeoff - it's pretty common with Xeons.

I'm hopeful for some mATX boards at least, if Asrock can do a mITX X99 then it's plausible they can pull off mATX with Threadripper. Give me ECC, 8+ SATA ports, and ideally an onboard SATA/SAS controller and/or fast 10 GbE or infiniband and it would be sick.

Djarum posted:

ECC support is hit and miss even on boards that say they support it. For example my motherboard says it supports ECC yet will not boot if it is installed. I have tried several other chip/board combos that say they should work with ECC but they do not. I imagine that most of the audience for this stuff never uses it so they don't get called out on it.

Do you have Threadripper, or is this Ryzen? This is supposed to be one of the advantages of Threadripper - as an actual workstation product it's supposed to be getting validated. Maybe not launch day but down the road. I'm looking at the ASUS X99M WS for a tiny super-NAS right now - it has 8 SATA ports which leaves 2x16 lane slots for future expansion of connectivity and SSDs.

Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Aug 11, 2017

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

If Godzilla can do it, you know I can deliver!

Pillbug


What motherboard is that mITX?

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll

Nap Ghost

The people in this thread have nothing on the crazy people on /r/datahoarder We're talking racks of equipment and PDUs sitting at home levels of crazy in there. Kinda goes with larger size population samples that you'll get the deviants

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!

Weird people. Not sure why hoarding data needs an overabundance of CPU power.

As said before, in terms of jack of all trades, the 7820X seems to crystalize as a better solution. It does way better in games and office stuff, and gives an OK bump in things like video transcoding and rendering compared to not-HEDT solutions. The only thing you get from going TR is a "cheaper" upgrade path because you can reuse your mainboard with TR2 (if it fixed core performance complaints).

Unless you need raw rendering power or tons of lanes, I'm not so sure it's the best solution. I'm honestly confused about lots of headlines along the line "better than Intel", when the core benchmarks show otherwise or are a tie at best.

Personally, I'm currently hard on the fence. I'd eventually need to see comparisons against a 5820K@4GHz, to see what I gain or lose for the benefit of getting ECC.

Paul MaudDib
May 3, 2006

"Tell me of your home world, Usul"


CommieGIR posted:

What motherboard is that mITX?

Asrock X99E-ITX/ac







edit: actually it is the X299E version with the daughterboards but the X99 is still a thing to behold.







Everyone else: it can't be done!!11!!one!

Asrock: hold my beer

Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Aug 11, 2017

Djarum
Apr 1, 2004

I promise, that one day, everything's going to be better for you.



Soiled Meat

Paul MaudDib posted:

Do you have Threadripper, or is this Ryzen? This is supposed to be one of the advantages of Threadripper - as an actual workstation product it's supposed to be getting validated. Maybe not launch day but down the road. I'm looking at the ASUS X99M WS for a tiny super-NAS right now - it has 8 SATA ports which leaves 2x16 lane slots for future expansion of connectivity and SSDs.

I have neither right now. I deal with a ton of hardware at work and what I said about things that state they support ECC don't actually in real life. I have ran into it with a lot of lower end and "enthusiast" X99 boards. All sorts of boards that state they support it in fact do not. Anything that is not a straight up server board be suspect of it until you are 100% sure it works in person.

Thermopyle
Jul 1, 2003

...the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. —Bertrand Russell



Desuwa posted:

ZFS doesn't have any special requirements for ECC but if you care about your data then you're running ECC memory, a checksumming file system, regular scrubs, and backups anyway. You can't skip any part of that chain.

There's not a care/don't-care dichotomy.

I care a lot, but not enough to spend a lot of money buying server hardware instead of using old desktop non-ECC-supporting hardware. And you can skip parts of that chain and still gain reliability.

Paul MaudDib
May 3, 2006

"Tell me of your home world, Usul"


Djarum posted:

I have neither right now. I deal with a ton of hardware at work and what I said about things that state they support ECC don't actually in real life. I have ran into it with a lot of lower end and "enthusiast" X99 boards. All sorts of boards that state they support it in fact do not. Anything that is not a straight up server board be suspect of it until you are 100% sure it works in person.

Having ECC memory on the QVL seems like an easy 'tell'.

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