As part of the T3 Podcast, we will be wading into the ECC vs Non-ECC debate for ZFS. @HoneyBadger and I would love to hear your thoughts on the following poll, which we will cover in next weeks episode.
Literally:
Well… For me, recent experience, teach that have ECC on nas doesn’t mean to be “bulletproof”… Is just 1 thing less to worry about 
I’ve been burned by bad RAM, couldn’t figure out for years why my desktop was unstable, after a while I just blamed Windows. Eventually I upgraded the RAM because I needed to run docker for development and all I had was some spare unbuffered ECC so I switched it out and the crashing stopped, to confirm my sanity I ran memtest on the old sticks and they failed.
Since then all my machines that work with ECC, have ECC. I’m just glad it happened to my desktop where it didn’t really matter and not my first TrueNAS server which didn’t have ECC because I probably wouldn’t have noticed until the damage was done.
I have a feeling this will be the main contention.
I agree that there’s nothing inherent about ZFS that necessitates the use of ECC RAM, above and beyond its benefits for any filesystem. The benefits of “ECC with ZFS” are the same as “ECC with any filesystem”.
However, when someone chooses ZFS for its resiliency and built-in integrity features, it implies that that care about their data more than a casual user. If they care enough to use ZFS, then they should be more inclined to consider ECC as another safeguard for their precious data, on top of what ZFS already provides.
Don’t be a coward! Choose a side!
I promise not to judge you… 
@kris I’ll give you props for not providing a third option of “Not sure”. 
No weasling out of it! Have to pick a side, much more fun this way 
The root cause is defective RAM, not the lack of ECC, I think.
Will ECC help much if the RAM itself is defective?
The key is that ECC will tell you that it’s having problems - and in the case of single-bit errors, correcting them.
Synology, Asustor, etc do not use ECC ram in their consumer and small business NAS products so I guess ZFS is aimed at data centers and those with data loss paranoia. After all, some data loss just happens for whatever reason and is why everyone should do regular backups.
ECC is nice to have, but not necessary to have.
I’m a true centrist. An undecided voter, if you will.
Have you ever seen an angry badger?
Have you ever seen a crossed Senior Vice-President?
ECC should always be used. On phones, on laptops, on workstations.
Maybe it doesn’t have to be used on video game consoles.
The reason it’s not is economics and marketing.
Some consider it a crime against humanity that Intel uses ECC for market segmentation, thus preventing consumers from being able to have a reliable computing experience.
Personally, a consumer should not have to buy a Xeon work station laptop in order to have ECC.
Your NAS… if you’re building a bespoke one, you should probably have ECC. It eliminates an entire class of issues.
But, if you’re using a spare PC or parts to build “My First TrueNAS”, then it’s better to start using ZFS, even without ECC.
I do have a TrueNAS without ECC, but it is a replication target, thus it should be immune as the checksums should’ve been calculated upstream with ECC and are present in the stream, thus corruption would be detected during a scrub.
Yes.
Marketing goes where folks spend money.
A lot of people (probably we can safe assume most, but not surely in a community like this one ) neither know what ECC Is.
Better have RGB LED 
Don’t know if have sense in english, but in Italy we say “like a dog that bite his own tail”.
If your livelihood or marital harmony depends on something, don’t cheap out.
I think the English equivalent is “like a dog chasing its tail”
