are you talking ECC RAM? because normal RAM sticks tend to fail in ways like “after 2 years of use this random page of memory is now reporting the 17th bit of every word as 1, no matter what value you actually write to it”. if you have faulty RAM like that, RAID won’t save you; copy a 1 GB file from ~/a to ~/b: it’s read into RAM, 100 bits are flipped, the RAID system takes what’s in RAM and commits it to disk, congrats: your RAID array will reliably preserve that corrupted file for 100 years. worse is when the bad bits aren’t file data but internal filesystem structures, and then you just lose half your directory tree.
so yeah, get ECC RAM. or if you don’t for some reason then when your bulletproof storage system starts reporting filesystem-level corruption 2 years from now, remember this comment and run memtest before spending $100’s replacing all the drives, motherboard, etc.
My system is a Dell precision rack 7910, with dual Xeon E5 processors (I forget the exact model off the top of my head) and yes, 64G of ECC memory. DDR 4 IIRC.
I’m telling you, the system is rock solid. I got it refurbished, so it was put through its paces before I got it. Any defective parts will have already failed and been replaced.
are you talking ECC RAM? because normal RAM sticks tend to fail in ways like “after 2 years of use this random page of memory is now reporting the 17th bit of every word as 1, no matter what value you actually write to it”. if you have faulty RAM like that, RAID won’t save you; copy a 1 GB file from ~/a to ~/b: it’s read into RAM, 100 bits are flipped, the RAID system takes what’s in RAM and commits it to disk, congrats: your RAID array will reliably preserve that corrupted file for 100 years. worse is when the bad bits aren’t file data but internal filesystem structures, and then you just lose half your directory tree.
so yeah, get ECC RAM. or if you don’t for some reason then when your bulletproof storage system starts reporting filesystem-level corruption 2 years from now, remember this comment and run
memtestbefore spending $100’s replacing all the drives, motherboard, etc.My system is a Dell precision rack 7910, with dual Xeon E5 processors (I forget the exact model off the top of my head) and yes, 64G of ECC memory. DDR 4 IIRC.
I’m telling you, the system is rock solid. I got it refurbished, so it was put through its paces before I got it. Any defective parts will have already failed and been replaced.